William Smaldone

William Smaldone has been teaching modern European history at Willamette University since 1991. His teaching repertoire includes courses in European urban history, German and Russian history, the Holocaust, the history of European socialism and the history of capitalism.

Smaldone's research interests focus on twentieth century German and European labor history. His first book, Rudolf Hilferding: The Tragedy of a German Social Democrat (1998), examines the life of one of German Social Democracy's leading economic and political thinkers from the turn of the century until the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933. His second work, Confronting Hitler: German Social Democrats in Defense of the Weimar Republic, 1929-1933 (2009), treats the failure of Germany's Social Democratic leadership in its struggle against Adolf Hitler's National Socialist movement. In 2013 he published European Socialism: A Concise History with Documents.

More recently, with Mark Blum of the University of Kentucky, Louisville, he has published Austro-Marxism: The Ideology of Unity, a two-volume collection of documents on one of twentieth century European socialism's most important intellectual currents. In 2022 he published '''Freedom is Indivisible'": Rudolf Hilferding's Correspondence with Karl Kautsky, Leon Trotsky, and Paul Hertz, 1902-1938.  He is currently preparing the first volume of Rudolf Hilferding's Collected Works.

Office Hours: Mon 1:00-2:30 p.m. and Thurs 10:00-11:30 a.m.