Hillsdale College Faculty Member Jason Gehrke Receives Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities
The grant will support research for an in-progress book project, ‘Just War: A Military History.’
HILLSDALE, Mich. — Assistant Professor of History Jason Gehrke has been selected to receive a Chairman’s Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant will support research for an in-progress book project, “Just War: A Military History.”
“There has been a lot of historical scholarship on the history of moral reasoning about war, but less on how those ideas have played out in an operational context,” Gehrke said. “In this book, I want to look at not the theorists but the practitioners. I will look at how leaders and policy makers have justified their strategic actions, how their explanations have shaped just war theory, and how moral reasoning about war has played out in practice.”
“In this book, I want to look at not the theorists but the practitioners.”
The $30,000 grant will be awarded directly to Gehrke to support travel, research, and archive work for the project, which is his second book.
He recently published his first book, “Roman Virtue in the Early Christian Thought of Lactantius,” in the Oxford Studies in Historical Theology.
“The new just war project develops from research I did for the first book,” Gehrke said. “Lactantius and Constantine represent a major inflection point in the history of Western moral reasoning about war. My first book explored one important figure whose thought is important for historical narratives about Christian just war reasoning. This book will deepen and expand on that theme.”
Jason M. Gehrke is assistant professor of history and associate director of the Center for Military History and Strategy at Hillsdale College. He received his B.A. in history from Hillsdale College, his M.A. in religion from Concordia Theological Seminary, and his Ph.D. in religious studies from Marquette University. He is a historian of Christianity focusing on Christian thought in the intellectual, political, and military history of late antiquity.
For a headshot of Gehrke, click here. For photos of Gehrke speaking at a Center for Military History and Strategy Conference, click here. For photos of Hillsdale College, click here. For a high-resolution copy of the Hillsdale College clocktower logo, click here.