Rate My Professor James Mace Ward

James Mace Ward is Teaching Professor in Modern European History Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Rhode Island. He received his B.A. from the University of Kansas in 1985, M.A. from the University of Washington in 2001, a second M.A. in 2003, and Ph.D. in 2008 from Stanford University. Before joining URI, Ward held term appointments at Stanford University, DePauw University, and Queen’s University Belfast. Having lived abroad for over a decade in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Thailand, he brings extensive firsthand experience to his teaching, specializing in modern Eastern Europe and the Second World War. Ward teaches modern European surveys, emphasizing writing as a mode of thinking.

Ward’s research interests encompass religion, nationalism, mass violence, collaboration, resistance, and expropriation. He is the author of the monograph Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia, published by Cornell University Press in 2013, which earned an Honorable Mention for the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Slovak and Czech editions appeared in 2018. His current project traces a general history of modern expropriation in Central Europe, framed as a voyage from Josephist Vienna to Stalinist Budapest, exploring episodes and debates about takings driven by modernity’s inner logic. Notable articles include “Hungarian Emancipation as a Model Central European Expropriation: How Discourses of Serfdom Argued for Takings” in Central Europe (2023), “Slovaks” in European Fascist Movements: A Sourcebook edited by Roland Clark and Tim Grady (Routledge, 2023), “The 1938 First Vienna Award and the Holocaust in Slovakia” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2015), and “Legitimate Collaboration: The Administration of Santo Tomas Internment Camp and Its Histories, 1942–2003” in Pacific Historical Review (2008), which received the Louis Knott Koontz Memorial Award for the most deserving article that year.