Julia Irwin

Associate Professor of History

University of South Florida

Fields of Expertise

Biography

Julia Irwin is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of History at the University of South Florida. She earned her Ph.D. in History, with a concentration in the History of Medicine and Science, from Yale University. Her research focuses on the place of humanitarian assistance in 20th century U.S. foreign relations and international history. Her first book, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a history of U.S. international relief efforts during the First World War era. She is now completing a second book, Catastrophic Diplomacy: A History of U.S. Responses to Global Natural Disasters, a history of U.S. foreign disaster assistance and emergency relief during the 20th century.

Bibliography

Monograph

  • Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

 

Journal Articles and Book Chapters (peer-reviewed)

  • “Disastrous Grand Strategy: Foreign Assistance and Catastrophic Humanitarianism,” in Rethinking Grand Strategy, eds. Christopher McKnight Nichols, Elizabeth Borgwardt, and Andrew Preston (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2021).
  • “On Disaster,” co-authored with Jenny Leigh Smith, Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 111:1 (2020): 98-103.
  • “The ‘Development’ of Humanitarian Relief: U.S. Disaster Assistance Operations in the Caribbean Basin, 1917-1931,” in The Development Century: A Global History, eds. Stephen Macekura and Erez Manela (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018): 40-60.
  • “Connected by Calamity: The United States, the League of Red Cross Societies, and Transnational Disaster Assistance after the First World War,” Moving the Social: Journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements 57 (2017): 57-76.
  • “Raging Rivers and Propaganda Weevils: Transnational Disaster Relief, Cold War Politics, and the 1954 Danube and Elbe Floods,” Diplomatic History 40:5 (2016): 893-921.
  • “Beyond Versailles: Recovering the Voices of Nurses in Post-World War I U.S.-European Relations,” Nursing History Review 24 (2016): 12-40.
  • “The Disaster of War: American Conceptions of Catastrophe, Conflict, and Relief,” First World War Studies 5:1 (2014): 17-28.
  • “Taming Total War: Great War-Era American Humanitarianism and Its Legacies,” Diplomatic History 38:4 (2014): 763-775.
  • Revised and expanded version in Beyond 1917: The United States and the Global Legacies of the Great War, eds. Thomas W. Zeiler, David K. Ekbladh, and Benjamin C. Montoya (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017): 122-139.
  • “Teaching ‘Americanism with a World Perspective’: The Junior Red Cross in the U.S. Schools from 1917 to the 1920s,” History of Education Quarterly 53:3 (2013): 255-279.
  • “The Great White Train: Typhus, Sanitation, and U.S. International Development during the Russian Civil War,” Endeavour 36:3 (2012): 89-96.
  • “‘Sauvons les Bébés’: Child Health and U.S. Humanitarian Aid in the First World War,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86:1 (2012): 37-65.
  • “Nurses Without Borders: The History of Nursing as U.S. International History,” Nursing History Review 19 (2011): 78-102.
  • “Nation Building and Rebuilding: The American Red Cross in Italy During the Great War,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8:3 (2009): 407-439.
  • Winner of the 2008-2009 Best Article Prize for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
  • “An Epidemic without Enmity: Explaining the Missing Ethnic Tensions in New Haven’s 1918 Influenza Epidemic,” Urban History Review 36:2 (2008): 5-17.

 

Other Academic Journal Articles and Book Chapters (non-refereed)

  • “Humanitarianism and U.S. Foreign Assistance,” in The Cambridge History of America and the World, vol. 3, 1900-1945, eds. Brooke Blower and Andrew Preston (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2021).
  • “The Origins of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance,” The American Historian 15 (2018): 43-49.
  • “The American Red Cross in Great War-Era Europe, 1914-1922,” The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 38:2 (2017): 117-131.
  • “Interchange: World War I,” Journal of American History 102:2 (2015): 463-499.

 

Editing Projects

  • Editorial Committee member, “Historical Approaches to Covid-19 Working Group,” supported by the National Science Foundation-funded Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) Network and the CONVERGE facility at the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, NSF Award #1841338 (2020).
  • Co-editor with Jenny Leigh Smith, “Focus: Disasters, Science, and History,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 111:1 (2020): 98-137.

 

Works in Progress

  • Catastrophic Diplomacy: A History of U.S. Responses to Global Natural Disasters (book-length monograph, in progress).