About the Author

Michael Bess is Chancellor's Professor of History at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.  He is a specialist in twentieth-century Europe, with a particular  interest in the social and cultural impacts of technological change.

Bess is the author of three books: Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (2006);  The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 (2003), which won the George Perkins Marsh prize (2004) of the American Society for Environmental History and an Honorable Mention (2004) from the Pinkney Prize committee of the Society for French Historical Studies; and Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategies for Peace, 1945-1989 (1993).

He is currently writing a research monograph entitled Artificial Persons: Shifting Boundaries of the Human in the Age of Robots and Clones.

Bess has received fellowships from the National Institutes of Health / National Human Genome Research Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Fulbright research grants program, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

Bess received his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989, and has been teaching at Vanderbilt ever since.  He teaches undergraduate courses on World War II, twentieth-century Europe, and Western Civilization, as well as specialized seminars on environmentalism, the boundaries of the human, or utopian thought.  His graduate courses include a survey of the historiography on twentieth-century Europe, and a semester-long workshop to train graduate students for teaching history at the college level.  Bess has been awarded the Ellen Gregg Ingalls Award for Excellence in Classroom Teaching and the Chair of Teaching Excellence.

Links
Michael Bess's homepage
More about Michael Bess's books
More about Michael Bess's current book project
Full CV
Read some of Michael Bess's writings online
Courses taught by Michael Bess