Levene, Mark 1953–

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LEVENE, Mark 1953–

PERSONAL: Born November 19, 1953, in London, England; children: Saul. Education: University of Warwick, B.A. (with honors), 1976; Wolfson College, Oxford, D.Phil., 1981. Politics: "Of a green-reddish hue touched with black." Hobbies and other interests: Organic gardening, bee keeping, cycling.

ADDRESSES: Home—37 Henry Rd., Oxford OX2 0DG, England. Office—Department of History, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of Warwick, Coventry, England, lecturer in history, beginning 1988; University of Southampton, Southampton, England, reader in comparative history, chair of Jewish History and Culture Board of Studies, and member of staff of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations. Worked for an advertising agency; worked with disturbed young people.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History, 1991, for War, Jews, and the New Europe.

WRITINGS:

War, Jews, and the New Europe: The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf, 1914–1919, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor, with Penny Roberts) The Massacre in History, Berghahn Books (New York, NY), 1999.

Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, Volume 1: The Meaning of Genocide, Volume 2: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide, I. B. Tauris (London, England), 2005.

Contributor to Journal of World History, Third World Quarterly, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and English Historical Review.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Two more volumes in the Genocide in the Age of the Nation State series.

SIDELIGHTS: Mark Levene is a history scholar whose book The Massacre in History, coedited with Penny Roberts, looks at the role of the massacre since Herod's Murder of the Innocents in biblical times to the ethnic fighting in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. The book grew out of a conference at the University of Warwick and contains the papers presented at the conference. The volume begins with a thirty-eight-page introduction by Levene in which he seeks to define the term massacre and to outline the conditions under which it occurs. Writing in History Today, Jeremy Black called Levene's introduction "an impressive piece of work." Among the topics The Massacre in History covers are massacres in France during the religious wars of the sixteenth century, in Russia against the Cicassian people in the mid-nineteenth century, and in Brazil against the Canudos religious community in 1897, as well as the massacre of civilians in Shanghai, China, by the Japanese military in 1937. Some of these tragic events are well known, while others are little documented and likely unfamiliar to most readers. Richard Crampton, reviewing The Massacre in History for the English Historical Review, noted that "the essays are all clearly argued, very well-researched and have interesting points to make." Eric Sterling, in his review for Idea: A Journal of Social Issues, found that "the essays in this collection are beautifully written in a clear prose…. An excellent and valuable book on the subject."

Levene once told CA: "I am trying to merge, in my writing, a concern for things which should matter a great deal, like where we're going and why, with some sort of academic detachment. I suspect this will be an impossible task. The global and local challenges which face us as we approach the millennium, however, will require more than academic pronouncements! I think I'm probably concerned to be something other than simply a chronicler of a declining, increasingly cannibalistic species."