Paul Michelson

I graduated from Emporia State in 1967; did an MA (1969) and a Ph.D (1975) in East European, Russian, and European History at Indiana University. Taught at Huntington University in Indiana. I retired as Professor Emeritus in August 2015 after 41 years of teaching, but continue to research and publish.

I have had three Fulbright fellowships in Romania (1971-1973; 1982-1983; 1989-1990). During the last one, the communist regime was overthrown. Some fun. I am an honorary member of the Romanian Academy's Institutes of History in Iași, București, and Cluj.

I have published over 200 articles and edited, written, or co-written several books including Romanian Politics, 1859-1871: From Prince Cuza to Prince Carol (1998) which was selected by CHOICE MAGAZINE as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1998 and was awarded the 2000 Bălcescu Prize for History by the Romanian Academy. I wrote the lead article on Romania for The Encyclopedia of East Europe: From the Congress of Vienna to the Fall of Communism (2000), edited by Rick Frucht, which was selected by CHOICE Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 2000.

I was the President (2006-2009) and Secretary (1977-2015) of the Society for Romanian Studies, served as the Secretary of the Conference on Faith and History from 2004 to 2014, and am currently a member of the board of the C. S. Lewis and Kindred Spirits Society of Central and Eastern Europe and editor of the CSLKS Newsletter.

My principal areas of research and publication include Romania in the 19th-21st Centuries, Totalitarian and post-Totalitarian societies, the History of Venice and the Venetian Ghetto, and the work of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Inklings.

On June 24, 2022, I celebrated two years since a kidney transplant. Details on the blog on my home page at www.pmichelson.com for the perversely motivated. My transplant doctors agreed that I was healthy enough to travel again and my wife and I went is the summer of 2022 for nearly six weeks to Romania (presenting two papers at the 9th International Congress on Romanian Studies) and Oxford (where we did two weeks of archival research at Regent's College).

I second what someone else said about the first class teachers we had at North. I remember the great examples set for us by Roy Harmon, Sid Tate, Edwin Elliott, and Gladys Mason, among others. Fun teachers, but no nonsense and took their vocations and us seriously. I won't go into what J. D. Unruh, Rick Harris, and I were up to as lab assistants for Chemistry, but I'm pretty sure we'd get arrested if we followed our curiosities today as we did then. One somehow has the idea that students today have less fun than we did in the 1960s.