Bradley J. Birzer

brad_birzer_interview-150x1501Dr. Bradley J. Birzer is the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in History at Hillsdale College, Michigan. He earned his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame (1990) and his Ph.D. from Indiana University-Bloomington (1999). Dr. Birzer is author of American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll (2010), Sanctifying the World: the Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (2007), J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (2003), co-editor of The American Democrat and Other Political Writings by James Fenimore Cooper (2000), and co-author of The American West (2002). Professor Birzer is a member of the Board of Trustees, and Chairman of the Board of Academic Advisors, for The Free Enterprise Institute. His essays on The Imaginative Conservative may be found here.

Books: 

American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll (2010)

Sanctifying the World: the Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (2007)

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (January 2003)

Encyclopedia of the American West (2002), co-written with Larry Schweikart.

American Democrat and Other Political Writings, editor (2001)

Other Publications:

“Tolkien’s ‘Last Battle’: A Johannine Ragnarök,” in Paul Kerry, ed., Tolkien and Religion(forthcoming, Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press).

“Christopher Dawson, Nationalism, and a Christian Republic of Letters,” in Gleaves Whitney, ed., Christopher Dawson: A Man for All Seasons (forthcoming).

“More Than ‘Irritable Mental Gestures’: Russell Kirk’s Challenge to Liberalism, 1950-1960,” Humanitas (forthcoming).

“Jean Baptiste Richardville: the French Métis and Geo-Political Realities of the Western Great Lakes, 1812-1840,” in R. David Edmunds, ed., Enduring Nations: Native Americans in the Midwest (University of Illinois Press, 2008), 94-108.

“Russell Kirk: Knight-Errant Against the Ideologues,” Second Spring (2008): 50-59.

“Christianity Migrating South,” Crisis (May 2007): 54-56.

“The Redeemer Nation,” Crisis (September 2006): 54-56.

“Stephen Lawhead and the Conundrum of Celtic Catholicism,” Saint Austin Review(March 2007).

“Administrative Mobbing,” Crisis (June, 2006), 51-53.

“Christopher Dawson: The Historian of the Twentieth Century,” Saint Austin Review(September/October 2005): 6-8.

“Renewing the West,” Crisis (September 2005): 47-48

“Face to Face: Interview with Annette Kirk,” Saint Austin Review (May/June 2005), 17-18.

“Conservative Gothic,” Crisis (February 2005): 52-54.

“Tolkien and Anglo-Saxon England,” Saint Austin Review (September/October 2004), 15-18.

“New Men and Women of Letters,” in Cynthia McNew, ed., More People’s Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien (Cold Springs Press: Cold Springs Harbor, New York, 2004).

“Tolkien and the Anglo-Saxon World,” Saint Austin Review (September/October 2004).

“Finding the Human Person,” Crisis (September 2004), 53-54.

“The Man Behind the Myth: J.R.R. Tolkien,” Christian History (Summer 2003).

“Grace and Will in Tolkien’s Legendarium: An Augustinian Understanding,” Saint Austin Review (January-February 2003).  A fuller version was published in Robert Lazu, ed.,J.R.R. Tolkien: Faith and Imagination in the Genesis of Literary Work (Bucharest, Romania: Hartmann Publishing House, 2005).

“‘The Only Just Literary Critic’: The Christian Gifts of J.R.R. Tolkien,” New Oxford Review(December 2001): 25-29.

“‘An appearance of lively industry about the place’: Choctaw Economic Success in Indian Territory, 1831-1861,” Continuity: A Journal of History 24 (Autumn 2001).

“French Imperial Remnants on the Middle Ground: The Strange Case of August de la Balme and Charles Beaubien,” Journal of the Illinois Historical Society 93 (Summer 2000): 135-54.

“Expanding Creative Destruction: Entrepreneurship in the American Wests,” Western Historical Quarterly 30 (Spring 1999): 45-63.

Nominated for the 1999 Don D. Walker Prize for Best Article in Western American Studies

 “The Private West: Voluntary Associations in the American Wests,” chapter in Michael Allen and Mary L. Hanneman, eds., Frontiers of Western History: Origins, Evolution, and the Future of Western History (Carmel, Ind.: Simon & Schuster, 1999; revised and reissued 2005).

“Silver, Discontent, and Conspiracy: The Ideology of the Western Republican Revolt, 1890-1901,” Pacific Historical Review 64 (May 1995): 243-65.

“Worshiping the ‘Strange God’: Fred T. Dubois and the Fight Against Repeal in 1893,”Idaho Yesterdays 38 (Winter 1995): 2-11.