Society members will no doubt by now be aware of the death of Professor Dennis Showalter on 30th December, 2019. Dennis was a pillar of the International Society to the end. A long-standing and active member, he was a member of the Board of Directors for many years, helping to support and guide the Society. The most generous of mentors, he was the embodiment of the Society’s aims of bringing together established and emerging scholars. His erudition, insight and kindness will be much missed.
Professor Michael Neiberg writes:
Dennis was long-time professor at Colorado College and a visiting professor at many military schools including the Air Force Academy, West Point, and the Marine Corps University. Despite never having had PhD students of his own, Dennis was a mentor, a teacher, and an inspiration to an entire generation of historians. He appears in hundreds of acknowledgements and dedications, and was also the subject of a Festschrift and a special issue of the journal War in History. He was a president of the Society for Military History, a founding member of the International Society for First World War Studies, and the winner of the prestigious Pritzker Medal.
Above all, though, Dennis was a true gentleman who saw the potential in every student and scholar with whom he ever worked. As his daughter, Clara Kathleen, wrote, the lesson of Dennis’s career and his life is “Be kind. Period. Lift up, don’t punch down. Assume the best and if you don’t get it challenge people to get there. That’s how you make the world better.”
We have lost a true titan and a good friend.
Many of us will have memories of Dennis, not least of his enormous contribution to Society conferences and discussions. If you wish to share these, please contact me at president@firstworldwarstudies.org. The Executive Committee, in consultation with the Board of Directors and Dennis’s family, will shortly be putting forward proposals for ways in which the Society can commemorate Dennis’s contribution to our work.