Theodore A. Wilson

Contact Information Phone: (785) 864-9460 Office: 3604 Wescoe Hall Email: taw@ku.edu

Professor, Assistant Chair and Director of Graduate Studies (Ph.D. Indiana, 1966). 20th- century U.S. political, military, and diplomatic history. Affliated faculty member of Russian and East European Studies and American Studies.

Having trained with Robert H. Ferrell at Indiana University, Wilson joined the Department of History faculty in 1965. For some years his research dealt primarily with the history of American foreign relations. That focus yielded such works as The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay 1941 (1969, 1991), for which he was awarded the Society of American Historians' Parkman Prize; a co-edited volume, Makers of American Diplomacy (1974); and The Marshall Plan, 1947-1951 (1977). He also co-authored Three Generations in Twentieth Century America: Family, Community, and Nation (1976, 1981). Beginning in the 1980s, he shifted focus to the World War II Allied coalition and to military history more generally. That research program, supported by stays at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the U.S. Army Center for Military History, has yielded WW2: Critical Issues (1974, 1994, 1998); D-Day, June 6 1944 (1994); Victory in Europe 1945: From World War to Cold War (2000); assorted articles; and Building Warriors: Selection and Training of U.S. Ground Combat Troops in World War II (forthcoming). Wilson serves as General Editor of the University Press of Kansas series, Modern War Studies, which has published some 130 original titles on military history and related subjects.

Afflicted with what some term a impulse toward civic responsibility and others claim is an obsessive desire to meddle, he has held such administrative posts at KU as director of graduate studies and chair of the Department of History, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, director of the Hall Center for the Humanities, and arguably holds KU's record for number of academic committees served on. He currently is Director of INTL, an interdisciplinary M.A. program in international Studies. Wilson regularly offers a general interest course on World War II and undergraduate and graduate courses in U.S. military history, the Cold War, and 20th century U.S. politics. He has directed approximately 40 M.A. theses and 30 Ph.D. dissertations, mostly treating aspects of U.S. foreign relations and the American military experience. Current research embraces Anglo-American cultural interaction during World War II, the U.S. Army and the early Cold War, and a long-gestating biography of Henry A. Wallace.