William I. Hitchcock is the James Madison Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His work and teaching focus on the global history of the 20th Century, in particular the era of the two world wars and the cold war.
He received his B.A. degree from Kenyon College in 1986 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1994, working under the supervision of Paul Kennedy. He taught at Yale for six years and served as the Associate Director of International Security Studies there. He published France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe (UNC, 1998) and co-edited a volume with Paul Kennedy titled From War to Peace: Altered Strategic Landscapes in the 20th Century (Yale, 2000). His work includes The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945-present (Doubleday/Anchor, 2002), and The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (Free Press, 2008), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a winner of the George Louis Beer Prize, and a Financial Times bestseller in the UK.
After teaching at Wellesley College and Temple University, he joined the History Department at the University of Virginia in 2010. His most recent book is The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), which was a New York Times bestseller. While at Oxford, he will be working on a book titled “A Shadow over the World: FDR, the Fascist Threat, and America’s Road to World War II,” which explores reactions in the United States to the rise of fascism in Europe from the 1920s to 1941.
He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia and is married to the Civil War historian Elizabeth R. Varon.
