William Roger Louis CBE FBA (born May 8, 1936), commonly known as Wm. Roger Louis or, informally, Roger Louis, is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire, a former president of the American Historical Association (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.
Early life
Louis was born in Detroit, Michigan, in the United States. His family was from Oklahoma, and he was raised in Oklahoma City. He attended Northwest Classen High School and was the assistant first horn player in the Oklahoma City Philharmonic.
His parents, Henry Edward Louis and Bena May Flood, were "solidly middle class people who set a strong example of the importance of work, thrift, and family". Louis admits that he is "less religious," but he describes his philosophy in life with the one-liner made famous by Franklin Roosevelt: "I am a Christian and a Democrat. What more does one need in life?"
Louis was involved in gymnastics and handball at the local YMCA, which was his first experience with segregation in Oklahoma. He traces his civil rights commitment to that experience.
Education
Louis earned his Bachelor of Arts at the University of Oklahoma (OU), his Master of Arts at Harvard University, and his Doctor of Philosophy at Oxford University.
Louis entered OU in 1954 as a Letters major, an honors curriculum that included one ancient and two modern languages, English, history, and philosophy. He spent his second year of college in Freiburg and Paris, where he roomed with Hans-Peter Schwartz, a biographer of Konrad Adenauer, and befriended Nancy Maginnes, the future wife of Henry Kissinger. His time abroad kindled an interest in African and Middle Eastern nationalism. He spent the summer of 1956 in Egypt and was in Cairo when Gamel Abdel Nasser announced Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal. Louis spent his last two years of college at OU, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
With the help of OU's Philip Nolan, Louis applied for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He was admitted to Harvard in 1959. The "best of [his] Harvard education" were the classes with Rupert Emerson, who taught nationalism in colonial Africa, and Barrington Moore, Jr., who provided an introduction to Karl Marx and Marxist analysis. That was "an approach so radically different from all others that it was a revelation," Louis later wrote. Louis benefited from Ernest R. May, who he regards as having "one of the most fertile and inventive minds of all historians I have known."
After one year at Harvard, Louis transferred to St. Antony's College at the University of Oxford. Arthur Smithies, the great Australian economist, had told Louis, "If you are really interested in studying Nasser and Africa and all that rot, then you had better go somewhere where they know something about it, which definitely is not Harvard.". Smithies helped Louis get a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford, where he began his studies in 1960. Louis studied under the historians Margery Perham, John Andrew Gallagher, and A. J. P. Taylor. Louis said that Taylor was "not only the towering radical historian of our time, but also one of the great writers of the English language."
Academic career
After completing his education, Louis taught courses for eight years at Yale University on comparative imperialism, where there already existed a strong tradition of research on German colonialism. Ronald Robinson wrote, "At conference after conference, the circle of Louis' consultants widened with the number of contributors. He made his first major contribution to Imperial history as the grand impresario of symposia.".
In 1970, Louis joined the history faculty of the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and became the director of the British Studies Seminar at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. He has directed British Studies since 1975, held the Kerr Chair in English History and Culture since 1985, and served as the chairman of the British Scholar Editorial Advisory Board since 2006. Louis was named in February 2009 the "University of Texas Professor of the Year" in recognition of his "unwavering dedication and service" to the students of UT.
Louis has been a proponent of area studies, a field that has risen to prominence.
Scholarship, writing, and editing
Louis is best known for his work on the British Empire and focuses mostly on official British imperial policies and decolonization in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East after World War II.