Biography

Ward received his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University in 2008, and has held term appointments there as well as at DePauw University and Queen’s University of Belfast. As a teacher, he specializes in modern Eastern Europe and the Second World War, but enjoys teaching a wide variety of topics, especially modern European surveys. In all of his classes, he stresses writing as a mode of thinking. He is an avid traveler and lived abroad for over a decade in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Thailand.

Ward’s research interests include religion, nationalism, mass violence, collaboration and resistance, and expropriation. His first monograph was a political and intellectual biography of Jozef Tiso (1887–1947), the priest-president of Slovakia during the Second World War and the only executed war criminal to be seriously proposed as a Catholic saint. His present research project is a general history of modern expropriation in Central Europe. Framed as a voyage through time and space from Josephist Vienna to Stalinist Budapest, this project will investigate a series of episodes of or debates about expropriation. The book’s premise is that expropriation has an inner logic that has served as a driver for modernity.