Nolan, Cathal J. 1956–

PERSONAL: Born August 2, 1956, in Dublin, Ireland; naturalized Canadian citizen; married Valerie Ellen Duff, September 7, 1985; children: Ryan Casey, Genevieve Michelle. Education: University of Alberta, B.A. (with honors), 1978; University of Toronto, M.A., 1982, Ph.D., 1989. Politics: "Moderate/democratic internationalist."

ADDRESSES: Office—International History Institute, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215. E-mail—cnolan@bu.edu.

CAREER: Government Secondary School, Kano State, Nigeria, social studies instructor and head of arts and English, 1978–80; Wandel Ltd., Toronto, Ontario, Canada, contract researcher and writer, 1982–83; Canadian Journal of Political Science, Ottawa, Ontario, editorial intern, 1987–88; St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, assistant professor of political science, 1989–90; Miami University, Coral Gables, FL, assistant professor of international relations, 1990–91; University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, visiting assistant professor of political science, 1991–95, research associate at Institute of International Relations, 1993–94; Boston University, Boston, MA, research associate professor, 1995–99, associate professor of history, 1999–, International History Institute, executive director, 1999–. Canadian International Development Agency, policy consultant 1985–86; Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, member; guest lecturer at other institutions, including Brigham Young University, U.S. Military Academy, Marquette University, University of British Columbia, Providence College, and Consejo Argentino para las Relaciones Internacionales, Buenos Ares; conference participant and organizer; guest on media programs in the United States and abroad.

MEMBER: Historical Society, International Studies Association, Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations.

AWARDS, HONORS: Justice Henry Batshaw Fellow in Human Rights, Canadian Human Rights Foundation, 1984; Barton Fellow in Peace and Security, Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, 1994; Choice magazine citations, "outstanding academic book of 1998, for Notable U.S. Ambassadors since 1775, and "outstanding academic reference work of 2002," for The Greenwood Encyclopedia of International Affairs; academic fellow, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, 2004–05; grants from King Saud University, Robert McCormack-Tribune Foundation, Western Front Organization, Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Connaught Foundation, and other organizations.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Carl C. Hodge, and contributor) Shepherd of Democracy?: America and Germany in the 20th Century, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1992.

Principled Diplomacy: Security and Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1993.

The Longman Guide to World Affairs, Longman (White Plains, NY), 1995.

(Editor and contributor) Ethics and Statecraft: The Moral Dimension of International Affairs, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1995, 2nd edition, Praeger Publishers (Westport, CT), 2004.

(Editor) Notable U.S. Ambassadors since 1775, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1997.

(Editor and contributor) Power and Responsibility in World Affairs, Praeger Publishers (Westport, CT), 2000.

The Greenwood Encyclopedia of International Affairs, four volumes, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 2002.

Encyclopedia of Modern World Wars, fourteen volumes, Praeger Publishers (Westport, CT), beginning 2004.

(Editor and contributor) Great Power Responsibility in World Affairs, Praeger Publishers (Westport, CT), 2004.

The Age of Wars of Religions, 1000–1650, two volumes, Greenwood Publishers (Westport, CT), 2006.

(Editor, with Carl C. Hodge) Encyclopedia of U.S. Presidential Foreign Policy, ABC-CLIO (Santa Barbara, CA), 2004.

Contributor to books, including Human Rights in Canada's Foreign Policy, edited by Robert O. Matthews and R. Cranford Pratt, McGill-Queen's University Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1988; Great Events from History: Human Rights, 1992; The Twentieth Century: Great Events from History, 1996; Redefining European Security: Military and Non-Military Aspects of Continental Stability, edited by Carl C. Hodge, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1999; Setting the 20th Century Stage, edited by Charles Neu and William Tilchin, Praeger Publishers (Westport, CT), 2005; and International Obligations in the Diplomatic Arena, edited by David Clinton, Praeger Publishers (Westport, CT), 2005. Founding editor of book series, "Humanistic Perspectives on International Relations," Praeger Publishers (Westport, CT), 1998–; founding coeditor of book series "International History," Praeger Publishers (Westport, CT), 1999–. Columnist for Natick Bulletin and Tab, 2001–03. Contributor to periodicals, including Review of International Studies, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary History, Ethics and International Affairs, Human Rights Quarterly, Paradigms: Kent Journal of International Relations, Political Science Quarterly, Current History, and American Journal of Legal History.

Some of Nolan's writings have been published in Estonian.

SIDELIGHTS: Cathal J. Nolan is the author and editor of works that explore topics such as U.S. foreign policy and relations, diplomacy, ethics, and human rights. In 1993, Nolan published Principled Diplomacy: Security and Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy. This volume examines U.S. foreign policy from many angles, maintaining that "as a consequence of U.S. diplomacy, ideas about representation, liberty, and a direct connection between human rights and international security have become increasingly important in defining and perhaps sustaining world order in the modern era." The author discusses how liberal-internationalist foreign policies have been developed, introduced, and changed, as well as how they have been accepted and how they have endured. Specifically, Nolan describes the former U.S. position in relation to the Soviet Union and the Cold War. He also expounds on the United Nations and its role in human rights issues.

Principled Diplomacy: Security and Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy met with favorable reviews. David P. Forsythe, writing in the American Political Science Review, commented that "because of its attention to the complexity inherent in ethical choice in an anarchical international society where security policy is trumps and because of its attention to congressional-executive interaction, this study of U.S. human rights policy stimulates even if it does not always convince." Ethics and International Affairs reviewer Joel H. Rosenthal deemed the study "a valuable historical overview" and found it "has both range and depth."

Nolan is also the coeditor of Ethics and Statecraft: The Moral Dimension of International Affairs. This collection of essays, mainly biographical, focus on the reactions of certain leaders to ethical issues. In one example, Nolan suggests that Franklin Roosevelt, in regard to his actions during World War II, had "to deceive in order to lead." Richard Price in the American Political Science Review observed that "the book does a service to the debate on international ethics by providing empirical support to break down what often became in the 'realist-idealist/liberal' debates an overly facile distinction between morality and power." According to Perspectives on Political Science contributor William A. Douglas, "anyone interested in international ethics will find this book useful."

Notable U.S. Ambassadors since 1775 contains "58 historical-biographical profiles [which] reflect the highest representation of American diplomacy," noted a Booklist reviewer—from Benjamin Franklin to Madeleine Albright. Nolan paints a historical retrospective of diplomacy in the United States through two centuries, and C.C. Hay III in Choice described the essays as "well-written, highly analytical, [and] informative."

In comments written for CA, Nolan once expressed his motivation for writing. "It is the thing I do best, and the one creative talent I possess. Even as a writer of history and contemporary foreign affairs analysis, there is still a great deal of what may only be called 'creativity' required to do the job right. My ambition as a writer—never of course realized, but aspired to in every sentence and phrase I compose—is to pen precisely the right words and phrases, those that best express the profound factual and moral truths, as well as the pervasive doubts, about the human condition for which we turn to history to understand in the first place.

"I am not conscious of any one or two direct influences on my writing, though I suspect that my more literary style—as opposed to the sterile social scientific approach so common in political science and even in history—is firmly rooted in my first intellectual love: literature, and in particular the great Russian novelists I read avidly as a teenager, and again as an undergraduate: Nikolay Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, and especially Leo Tolstoy. I have been told that my writing is quite unusual within my field; in reviews it often elicits praise for its reputed eloquence and especially for its clarity.'

"If that praise is deserved, then I must also credit Plato's Socratic dialogues, which I first read at about age nineteen or twenty. Plato's profound simplicity, which is always a delight and a great surprise to young people raised to think of philosophers as inscrutable, left a lasting mark. The fact that the most serious questions imaginable about the nature of politics and human behavior were raised so many centuries ago in straightforward prose has been a great influence, on my teaching as well as on my writing (and those are, of course, intimately related acts). Niccolo Machiavelli falls into the same category of writers who achieved profundity through simplicity.

"In the final analysis, it is the nature of the material I work with—the long drama of human cruelty and suffering—that makes the most powerful stylistic demands. Being human, one is often tempted by egoism to indulge in a lurid phrase or sweeping assertion when writing history. But it never seems quite proper to give into one's more Byzantine literary weaknesses when describing someone else's war, genocide, or suffering. So I try hard to avoid concealing the naked realities of my subject under silken prose. Conversely, it is not helpful or true to write abstractly or amorally about human affairs, as the vast majority of modern social scientists and a growing number of historians tend to do. And so, I also avoid language that suggests, always falsely, that no individual or identifiable decision was responsible for this or that triumph or tragedy."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Nolan, Cathal J., Principled Diplomacy: Security and Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1993.

PERIODICALS

American Political Science Review, December, 1993, David P. Forsythe, review of Principled Diplomacy: Security and Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy; September, 1997, Richard Price, review of Ethics and Statecraft: The Moral Dimension of International Affairs, pp. 778-779.

Booklist, February 15, 1998, review of Notable U.S. Ambassadors since 1775, p. 1036.

Choice, May, 1993, p. 1544; March, 1998, C.C. Hay III, review of Notable U.S. Ambassadors since 1775, pp. 1174-1175.

Ethics and International Affairs, Volume 8, 1994, Joel H. Rosenthal, review of Principled Diplomacy, pp. 217-218.

Perspectives on Political Science, spring, 1997, William A. Douglas, review of Ethics and Statecraft, pp. 121-122.