Dr. Geoffrey Wawro Speaks at the Addison Rotary

Dr. Geoffrey Wawro is University Distinguished Research Professor and Founding Director of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas.  From 1996-2005, he was Professor of Strategy & Policy and Professor of Strategic Studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Wawro’s Ph.D is from Yale University, his B.A. Magna Cum Laude from Brown University.  He was an English-Speaking Union Scholar at Cheltenham College in the U.K., and a Fulbright Scholar at Austria’s University of Vienna.  He speaks German, French, Spanish, and Italian. 

 

Wawro is the author of seven books, most recently Vietnam: A Military History (Basic Books, 2024).  He is also the author of Sons of Freedom: The Forgotten American Soldiers Who Defeated Germany in World War I (Basic Books, 2018), A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire (Basic Books, 2014), Quicksand: America's Pursuit of Power in the Middle East (Penguin Press, 2010), The Franco-Prussian War (Cambridge, 2003), Warfare and Society in Europe, 1792-1914 (Routledge, 2000), and The Austro-Prussian War (Cambridge, 1996). 

 

Wawro has published articles and op-eds in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, TIME, and many other newspapers, journals, and blogs.  He has won several prizes, including the Austrian Cultural Institute Prize and the Society for Military History Moncado Prize for Excellence in the Writing of Military History.  The Franco-Prussian War was shortlisted for the American Historical Association Paul Birdsall Prize for the most important work on European strategic or military history in 2003.  A Mad Catastrophe was shortlisted for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature and named one of the “best books of 2014” by The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.  Sons of Freedom was shortlisted for the New York Historical Society’s Gilder Lehrman Prize in Military History.  Wawro is co-editor of the more than forty volumes in the Cambridge Military Histories. 

 

Dr. Wawro has supervised over 20 Ph.D. dissertations and Master’s theses, lectured on history, military innovation and international security in Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, Latin America, the U.S., and Canada, and for several years was the Naval War College Review's "special correspondent," a designation that took him to "places or events of strategic or technological interest," including Iran, Brazil and the Paris Air Show.  From 2000-2009, Geoffrey Wawro anchored six different shows for The History Channel on books, movies, business, and current events.  He continues to work frequently as an on-camera expert for Netflix, History, Discovery, Smithsonian, American Heroes, National Geographic, Science, and other channels.  Wawro has two sons -- Winslow and Matias -- and lives in Dallas, Texas. 

 

https://geoffreywawro.com