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Four new updates for me:
1. in February 2025. I was elected an honorary member of the Romanian Academy, the highest academic recognition in Romania. I am currently the only non-ethnic Romanian honorary member from the US. (https://agerpres.ro/cultura-media/2025/02/12/alegeri-la-academia-romana-arhitectul-dorin-stefan-si-profesorul-emerit-paul-e-michelson---noi-membr--1421808)
2. Once again this year, as is the case for most of you, I have been setting new personal bests for consecutive days living. (Since then, I have achieved numerous additional such personal bests.)
3. In May-June, 2025, we spent a month in Romania giving some 25 lectures (including three key-note lectures), roundtables, etc. on Romanian history, Romanian church history, C.S. Lewis, and Historiography.
4. On June 24, 2025, I celebrated the fifth anniversary of my kidney transplant with flying colors. The kidney lent to me by my youngest son is actually functioning better than normal with a creatinine level of 0.80.
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).
We were quite busy in 2023 and 2024. My wife and I spent a month in the summer of 2023, and five weeks in the fall of 2023 in Romania. And in 2024, we spent and additional five weeks in Romania. We particilpated in and gave papers at the International meeting of the Society for Romanian Studies; the international conference of the C. S. Lewis and Kindred Spirits Society; and giving lectures at various history institutes, universities, and other venues. Exhausting but fun, except for a mild case of covid in fall 2023 (by mild, I mean we coughed a lot and had flu-like symptoms, but not as bad as cases of flu previously and it was gone in two weeks).
