Sean McMeekin

Sean McMeekin (born May 10, 1974, in Idaho) is an American historian. He is a specialist in European history of the early 20th century, especially regarding the origins of the First World War, and the role of Russia and the Ottoman Empire. He is currently Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College in upstate New York.

Sean McMeekin

Life

McMeekin grew up in Rochester, New York and studied history at Stanford University (B.A. 1996) and the University of California, Berkeley (M.A. 1998 and PhD 2001) as well as in Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. He also held a Henry Chauncey Jr. '57 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale and was a fellow of the Remarque Institute at New York University. McMeekin taught in Turkey as an assistant professor in the Centre for Russian Studies at Bilkent University in Ankara[1] and in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Koç University in Istanbul. He is now professor of history at Bard College in New York state.

His main research interests include modern German history, Russian history, communism, and the First World War. He has authored books and essays which have appeared in journals such as Contemporary European History and Communisme.

McMeekin's book The Russian Origins of the First World War, which advances a view of Russian involvement beyond that of what most historians have concluded, has been criticized for not convincing readers of its core theses.[2][3][4] Its treatment of the Armenian genocide has also been criticized, one reviewer calling the book "thoroughly unconvincing"[5] and another arguing that "The mass slaughter of Armenian civilians was in no way justified by the haphazard Russian support for Armenian paramilitary groups in Eastern Anatolia."[4]

Prizes
  • 2010: Norman B. Tomlinson Jr. Book Prize for The Russian Origins of the First World War
  • 2011: Barbara Jelavich Book Prize for The Berlin-Baghdad Express
  • 2015: Arthur Goodzeit Book Award for The Ottoman Endgame
  • 2016: Historian's Prize of the Erich-und-Erna-Kronauer-Stiftung

Selected works
  • The Red Millionaire. A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow's Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West. Yale University Press, New Haven 2003, ISBN 0-300-09847-2.
  • History's Greatest Heist. The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks. Yale University Press, New Haven 2009, ISBN 978-0-300-13558-9.
  • The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2010, ISBN 978-0-674-05739-5.
  • The Russian Origins of the First World War. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2011, ISBN 978-0-674-06210-8.
  • July 1914: Countdown to War. Basic Books, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-465-03145-0.
  • The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908–1923. Penguin Press, New York 2015, ISBN 978-1-59420-532-3.
  • The Russian Revolution: A New History. Basic Books, New York 2017, ISBN 978-0465039906. Review in New York Times

References
  1. Our Staff
  2. Bobroff, Ronald P. (2013). "The Russian Origins of the First World War". Revolutionary Russia. 26 (1): 82–84. doi:10.1080/09546545.2013.780778.
  3. Rendle, Matthew (2014). "The Russian origins of the First World War". First World War Studies. 5 (3): 340–342. doi:10.1080/19475020.2014.969896.
  4. Sanborn, Joshua (2012). "Sean McMeekin. The Russian Origins of the First World War". The American Historical Review. 117 (4): 1329–1330. doi:10.1093/ahr/117.4.1329.
  5. Usitalo, Steven A. (2016). "Armenian History and the Question of Genocide". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 30 (2): 376–378. doi:10.1093/hgs/dcw044.
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