Legacy Lecture

William I. Hitchcock is the William C. Corcoran Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His work and teaching focus on the international, diplomatic and military history of the 20th Century, in particular the era of the 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).

He moved to Wellesley College in 1999, where he taught for five years, and then took a position as a dean and professor of history at Temple University in Philadelphia. After publishing The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945-present (Doubleday/Anchor, 2002), he went on to write about the experience of liberation at the close of World War II. His book, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (Free Press, 2008) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a winner of the George Louis Beer Prize, and a Financial Times bestseller in the UK. In 2010, he moved to the University of Virginia. 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.

He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia and is married to the Civil War historian Elizabeth R. Varon.