Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson (born September 5, 1953) is an American classicist, military historian, and conservative political commentator. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Washington Times, and other media outlets.
Not to be confused with Victor M. Hansen.
Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson
September 5, 1953
Fowler, California, U.S.
Classicist, military historian, political commentator
Military history, ancient warfare, ancient agrarianism, classics, politics
National Humanities Medal (2007)
He is a professor emeritus of Classics at California State University, Fresno, the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution, and visiting professor at Hillsdale College. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush and was a presidential appointee in 2007–2008 on the American Battle Monuments Commission.
Early life and education[edit]
Hanson grew up in Selma, California, in the San Joaquin Valley, and has worked there most of his life.[1] He is of Swedish and Welsh ancestry, and his father's cousin, for whom he was named, was killed in the Battle of Okinawa.[2]
Hanson received a B.A. in classics and general Cowell College honors from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1975 and his PhD in classics from Stanford University in 1980.[1]
Academic career: 1985–2004[edit]
In 1985, he was hired at California State University, Fresno, to launch a classical studies program. In 1991, Hanson was awarded the American Philological Association's Excellence in Teaching Award, given annually to the nation's top undergraduate teachers of Greek and Latin. He was named distinguished alumnus of the year for 2006 at University of California, Santa Cruz.[3] He has been a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University in California (1991–1992) and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California (1992–1993), received an Alexander Onassis traveling fellowship to Greece (1999) and a Nimitz Fellow at University of California, Berkeley (2006), and held the visiting Shifrin Chair of Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland (2002–2003).[4]
In 2004, he took early retirement to focus on his political writing and popular history.[5] Hanson has held a series of positions in ideologically-oriented institutions and private foundations He was appointed Fellow in California Studies at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think-tank in California, in 2002.[6] Hanson was appointed Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, another conservative think-tank in California. He was often the William Simon visiting professor at the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, a private Christian institution in California (2009–15), and was awarded in 2015 an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from the graduate school at Pepperdine. He gave the Wriston Lecture in 2004 for the Manhattan Institute whose mission is to "develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility." He became a board member of the Bradley Foundation in 2015 and served on the HF Guggenheim Foundation board for over a decade.