Obituary

George L. Mosse, an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell and a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, died Jan. 22 at his home in Madison, Wis. He was 80.

Mosse was the Bascom Emeritus Professor of History at Wisconsin and emeritus professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was appointed an A.D. White Professor at Cornell in 1993, and planned a final visit to Cornell in September of this year.

Prior to his tenure as an A.D. White Professor, Mosse visited Cornell as a guest of the Society for the Humanities and for one year as a Clark fellow, said Dominick LaCapra, Cornell's Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies in the Society for the Humanities.

"He thus had a long-term relation with colleagues at Cornell -- many of whom had studied with him -- and during his time here, he came to know, and to contribute immensely to the work of, many students," LaCapra said. "We at Cornell experience in a deeply personal way the loss that is felt by the international academic community."

Mosse was a world renowned authority on European fascism and Hitler's Germany, and the author of more than 15 books.

Born in Berlin to a Jewish family that published Germany's leading liberal newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt, Mosse fled the Nazis in 1933, traveling first to France and later to England, where he studied at Cambridge University.

He eventually became a U.S. citizen, receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees at Haverford College and Harvard University, respectively, and teaching at the University of Iowa before joining the University of Wisconsin's faculty in 1955.

Mosse also served as the first historian-in-residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.