A Few Words About my Life and Career
I must have been born with a restless nature, something that
will explain why I have traveled so much, changed fields so
many times. Born in Montreal, Canada,
I have lived most of my life in the Los Angeles area,
where for
some decades now I have been a professor of history at the
California Institute of Technology. My publications have
included works of history, biography, and criticism, but in
recent years I have turned to more imaginative forms of writing
-- a book of family stories entitled The Man Who Swam Into
History (2005), and two novels, King of Odessa (2003),
Red Star, Crescent Moon: A Muslim-Jewish Love Story
(2010), and a memoir, Adventures of a Postmodern Historian: Living And Writing the Past (2016).
My works of narrative history and/or biography include
Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (1975
Commonwealth Club of California medal for Non Fiction), which
was used as the basis of the Academy Award winning film
Reds; Crusade of the Left (1970), an account of
the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War and
Mirror in the Shrine (1988), a multi-voiced work that
deals with three American sojourners in 19th century Japan.
I have also produced three volumes about the historical film,
a book of essays, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film
to Our Idea of History (1995), an anthology,
Revisioning History: Filmmakers and the Construction of a
New Past (1995) and a summation of my theories on the visual
media, History on Film / Film on History (2006).
The first of this trio was named Book of the Year by the
international journal, Film Historia.
My writings have been translated into several foreign languages,
including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese,
Korean, Hungarian, and Polish. I have won four fellowships from
the National Endowment for the Humanities, three Fulbright
fellowships, and have been a visiting professor at the
University of Barcelona; the European University Institute in
Florence; the University of La Laguna in the Canary Islands;
Kyushu University in Japan; the University of Tolima in
Colombia; and St. Andrews University.
In the late eighties, I created and served for six years as
editor of the film section of the American Historical Review;
in the nineties I helped to found
Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice;
and in 2010 I joined the editorial board of
Reviews in American History. My involvement with film
productions includes time spent as consultant on both dramatic
features and documentaries, including:
Reds, The Good Fight, Darrow, and Tango of Slaves. My
essays and works of fiction have appeared in
Partisan Review, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and
Michigan Quarterly Review, and I have contributed
occasional pieces and reviews to the
New Republic, the Progressive, the New York Times, the Los
Angeles Times, the Guardian (Manchester) and the
Times (of London).
Over the years I and my wife, Nahid Massoud, have visited more
than thirty countries on six continents. We are both devoted
swimmers (we met in a YMCA pool), hikers, and practitioners of
Iyengar Yoga. Nahid Massoud, who worked in psychiatry for many
years, have more recently become director of an art space named
Sharq (the East), devoted to showing the works of bi cultural
artists whose roots lay in the Middle East or South Asia. She
has hosted events and exhibitions for artists from Lebanon,
Palestine, Israel, Kurdistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and Armenia.
Nahid is also involved in raising orchids and succulents and
practicing photography.
Curriculum Vitae
GENERAL INFORMATION
Position: Emeritus Professor of History, California Institute of Technology
Address: Humanities/Social Sciences, 101-40, Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125
Telephone and FAX: (310) 459-6041 E-mail: rr@hss.caltech.edu
Education: PhD
in History, University of California, Los Angeles: 1966
AWARDS / HONORS
Silver Medal Award, 1975 - Commonwealth Club of California: Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed
Book of the Year 1995 - Visions of the Past - Awarded by Film Historia
Barnes and Nobel Discover Great
New Writers, 2003 - for King of Odessa
BOOKS
Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion and the Spanish Civil War. N.Y.:Pegasus, 1969.
New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Publishers, 2009 (With a new introduction)
Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1975;
Quality Paperback Book Club Selection, 1982
Awarded: Silver Medal, Commonwealth Club of California, 1975
Translations, Foreign Editions:
John Reed: rivoluzionario romantico. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1976.
John Reed: le romantisme revolutionnaire. Paris: Francois Maspero, 1976; republished, Editions Seuil, 1982.
John Reed: Un revolucionario romantico. Mexico, D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1979
Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed. London: Penguin, 1982
Romantikus Forralmor: John Reed Elete. Budapest: Kossuth, 1983
John Reed Pyeongjeon. Seoul: Agora, 2007
Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters in Meiji Japan. Cambridge: Harvard, 1988.
History Book Club Selection: 1988.
Translations:
Hearn, Morse, Griffis no Nihon. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2000.
Lo Specchio e il Santuario. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001.
Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge: Harvard, 1995.
Translations:
El pasado en imagenes: El desafio del cine a nuestra idea de la historia.
Madrid: Ariel, 1997.
King of Odessa. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003.
The Man Who Swam Into
History: The (Mostly) True Story of my Jewish Family.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.
History on Film / Film on History. London and New York: Pearson, 2006.
Portuguese Translation: A historia nos filmes / Os filmes na historia. Sao Paolo, Brazil: Paz e Terral Ltda, 2010
Spain La historia en el cine, El Cine sobre La Historia. Madrid, Rialp, 2013
Red Star, Crescent Moon:
A Muslim Jewish Love Story. (Washington DC: NAP, 2010).
EDITED WORKS, ANTHOLOGIES, COLLECTIONS
Protest from the Right.
Beverly Hills: Glencoe - Macmillan Co., 1968, 2nd Edition, 1970.
Seasons of Rebellion: Protest and Radicalism in Recent America. New York: Holt, 1972.
Los cantos de la conmocion: Veinte años de rock. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1974
Revisioning History: Filmmakers and the Construction of the Past. Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 1995.
Experiments in Rethinking History. Co-editor with Alun Munslow.
New York and London: Routledge, 2004.
The Blackwell Companion
to Historical Film. Co-editor with Constantin Parvulescu.
Oxford: Blackwells-Willey, 2013
.