James Mace Ward is an acting assistant professor of European history at Stanford University. During summer 2009, he will be affiliated with the Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte at the University of Vienna. 

Besides teaching at the Stanford Department of History, Ward is also a product of it, having received his Ph.D. there in June 2008. His dissertation is a political and intellectual biography of Jozef Tiso (1887–1947), the priest-president of Slovakia during the Second World War. In support of this research, Ward received several fellowships, including from the Mellon Foundation, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Fulbright-Hayes Program, and the International Research and Exchanges Board.

Ward’s research examines the intersections between religion, nationalism, and mass violence. His published work on Tiso includes “‘People Who Deserve It’: Jozef Tiso and the Presidential Exemption,” in the December 2002 issue of Nationalities Papers. Although specializing on the history of modern Eastern Europe, Ward is also interested in exploring collaboration and resistance from a broader, comparative perspective. His most recent publication accordingly dealt with American internees in Japanese-occupied Manila during the Second World War (“Legitimate Collaboration: The Administration of Santo Tomás Internment Camp and Its Histories, 1942–2003,” in the May 2008 issue of Pacific Historical Review).

 At present, Ward is revising his dissertation for publication as a book while developing ideas on a second project, a history of modern, state-led expropriation in relation to the social question, broadly defined.  Framed as a journey through time and space down the Danube from Josephist Vienna to Stalinist Budapest, this monograph would investigate a series of episodes of or debates about expropriation within a Central European context.