Charles King, professor of international affairs and government, Georgetown University. Sponsors: CREES, Frankel Center for Judaic Studies.
When the Red Army marched into Odessa in the muddy spring of 1944, Soviet officials counted forty-eight Jews living there. Three years earlier, there had been over 200,000. The destruction of the city's large Jewish community was the darkest chapter in the life of one of Europe’s foremost centers of Jewish culture and the northern cousin of cosmopolitan Mediterranean cities such as Naples, Marseilles, and Thessaloniki. Drawing from his new book Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, Charles King will highlight the role of Romanian occupation forces during the war and recast the experiences of average Odessans—both Jewish and non-Jewish—as revealed in newly uncovered archival sources. This event is co-sponsored by the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies.
Charles King is professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University. He previously served as chairman of the faculty of Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is the author of five books, including Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus, and The Black Sea: A History. King studied history and philosophy at the University of Arkansas and later earned master’s and doctoral degrees at Oxford University, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. Before coming to Georgetown, he was a junior research fellow at New College, Oxford, and a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
