It is with deep sadness that the Department of History announces the passing of professor emeritus George Behlmer, who died on January 4, 2024.
George earned his BA, with highest honors, in 1970 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. During his time as an undergraduate, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and also named a Regents Scholar and a President’s Undergraduate Research Fellow. What's more, George was also a California state finalist in the Rhodes Scholarship competition.
He went on to Stanford University to complete his graduate work in British and modern European history, earning his MA in 1972 and a PhD in 1977. His dissertation, “The Child Protection Movement in England, 1860-1890,” was advised by Peter Stansky. In addition to history coursework while at Stanford, George used his time to take courses in psychology to further develop his interest in psychological factors and historical change.
Upon completing his PhD, George spent a year as a teaching and research fellow in European history at Stanford, followed by a year as a lecturer in history at Yale.
In 1979, George arrived at the University of Washington as an assistant professor in History. In keeping with his track record of excellence, he was awarded a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1982 while still an assistant professor. Years later when interviewed about the award and asked about his memories of teaching, he noted, “In the first Irish history class I taught, I had a role-playing exercise. The debate was over whether the British Army should be forced to leave Northern Ireland. One student, who was Irish and thought of the IRA as heroes, had to argue for the British. He got involved more than any student I’ve ever had. He even called the Rev. Ian Paisley in Ireland and interviewed him on tape. During the class, when he was asked a question, he played the tape. It blew everyone away.”
His dedication to teaching the history of Northern Ireland and of the Republic--and especially to examining viewpoints about the conflicts there--led to four UW study abroad programs in Belfast between 2001 and 2007. His lifelong affection for that part of the world culminated in his 2012 History Lecture Series, Revenge and Reconciliation in Modern Ireland.
George was a prize-winning and prolific historian. In all of his work, he resisted simple dichotomies and offered startlingly sensitive and nuanced accounts of his historical subjects--often of those whose voices had gone unrepresented. In 1982, he published Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England (Stanford, 1982), a revised version of his Stanford dissertation. It won the best first book prize from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850-1940, also from Stanford, came out in 1998 and dissected the deification of the family in Victorian England, illuminating contemporary debates about “family values” and their political deployment as well as their multifaceted histories. George was keenly attuned to the injustices of which families were policed and how the concept of familial love could be weaponized. As one friend recalled, “human angst appealed to him, always.” Unhappy families, we might say, interested him far more than happy ones! But to all of these families, he brought a sympathetic sensibility, analyzing the powerful social, political, and economic forces that shaped human relationships.
Friends of the Family was followed by a volume of essays coedited with Fred Leventhal in honor of Peter Stansky, Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia, and Identity in Modern British Culture (Stanford, 2000). Among George’s prize-winning articles was “Grave Doubts: Victorian Medicine, Moral Panic, and the Signs of Death,” (Journal of British Studies, 2003), which was the cowinner of the 2003 North American Victorian Studies Association Donald Gray Prize.
George’s most recent book was Risky Shores: Savagery and Colonialism in the Western Pacific (Stanford, 2018), which won the 2019 Stansky Book Prize, sponsored by the North American Conference on British Studies. The book, which carefully parsed the concept of “savagery” as applied to Pacific peoples, was the subject of a featured review in the June 2020 issue of the American Historical Review. With George’s characteristic precision, he explored how the notion of savagery was used not only to marginalize native populations, but to emphasize the fragility of Indigenous cultures. The NACBS Stansky prize citation praised George for skillfully demonstrating how British and Pacific Islander actors negotiated a range of identities and interactions from Captain Cook’s death on a Hawaiian beach in 1779 to the aftermath of the Second World War. Lively and engaging, but never sensationalistic, Risky Shores treats the Pacific (like the family) as a site of mutual misunderstanding and misrepresentation.
Over the course of his career, George served on numerous PhD committees. He was an active member of the North American Conference on British Studies and the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies and held several leadership positions, including the presidency of PCCBS from 2011-12.
George’s drive to excel in his scholarship and teaching was echoed in his love of sports. He was known as a highly accomplished athlete, a star swimmer in his youth who became an accomplished triathlon competitor in his 70s. All will remember his integrity and the incredibly high standards he set for himself, coupled with his sharp humor and generosity towards students and colleagues (whose work he edited with rigor, but also tact). He was his own hardest (and most self-deprecating) critic, and a painstaking reviser of his own work--which resulted in his beautifully clear and direct prose.
Donations are being accepted to establish a fund in memory of George. To contribute, please donate through this link.
We invite you to share your memories of George, which we will post below.
George and I became friends when I was on the UW School of Public Health in the 1990s. We met at the gym, and became running buddies. He encouraged me to write a textbook on occupational epidemiology, which was my area of research and teaching. Basically, I found George to be a terrific encouraging friend.
Harvey Checkoway
UC San Diego School of Public HealthI did not start as an undergraduate at UW until I was 28 years old. In classrooms full of younger undergraduates, Dr. Behlmer made me feel welcome at UW and valued the more mature contributions I made to classroom discussions. He was a strict but very supportive mentor who later allowed me to observe and write about his teaching/classes when I was doing my own graduate work in education. I am incredibly sad to learn of his passing, and will always cherish his memory in my heart.
Dr. Elizabeth Flanagan (formerly Demong)
Washington StateI am very sad to hear of George’s passing. He taught me a lot of history when I was at UW between 1979 and 1983. But also a lot about how to write, how to have high standards, how to read effectively. He was part of a group of young (and not so..) history professors, including Mary O’Neil, John Toews, Fred Levy, Dauril Alden, whose dedication to teaching was as great as their dedication to research. All wanted to make us “better”. They, and George chief among them, taught life lessons through history lessons.
I kept in touch with George over the years (my wife’s first visit to Pike Place was to lunch with George and I was able to meet his wife there for a lovely get together some years later), losing contact only in recent years. I was even able to help him with one of his student groups which visited Dublin around 2007. I asked some of that group about George and their answer suggested he hadn’t changed much: clever, very demanding, an educational experience in himself. I had accidentally come to know of one or two instances when his compassion and integrity led students to him for help in very difficult moments. Many of his students took his classes over and over, appreciating what he offered.
I last met him in person just after Christmas 2015, where he described his recent work on colonial accounts of cannibalism, and he was kind enough to encourage me in regard to a memoir I was considering. He was still actively trying to make his mark on historical scholarship to his own high standards.
My sympathies to all his friends and loved ones
Kevin Cardiff
County Dublin, IrelandA few weeks into my first class with Dr. Behlmer, I disagreed with his statement and got into a back-and-forth. He paused and said, “So now I know I have to make you angry to get you to talk.” I laughed and said apparently. He was right. He purposely pushed me until I gave a well evidenced and argued answer (it was what someone like me needed). A self-professed contrarian and Luddite (a word he taught us that has been in my vocabulary ever since), I learned a lot by feeling able to work through my thoughts in his lectures, knowing that the path to the answer was just as critical as the final point.
Dr. Behlmer also taught my senior seminar. He let me get away with it and even liked my paper on Worcestershire Sauce as a representation of “Englishness” in Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. It is still one of my favorite pieces of writing. I have the original copy with his edits with me today. My work in this seminar became my writing sample for graduate admissions. When I applied to graduate school, Dr. Behlmer was the first person I asked for a recommendation letter. I will be forever grateful for his support and encouragement. His impact on my writing, my presence in lectures and discussions, and his role in my early academic life have led me to the final year of my Ph.D.
Thank you for everything.
Baylee Staufenbiel
Florida State UniversityI was saddened to read of Professor Behlmer's passing in the UW History Newsletter. I am a former student of Professor Behlmer's. I took his honors historiography seminar in my third year of college, back in the spring of 2011. The purpose of this seminar was to prepare the students of the honors cohort to write their senior theses. In order to make a serious study of the past, we needed to familiarize ourselves with how historians think about the past, how historical knowledge is and has been created, explicated, justified, etc. It has been 13 years since I took his course. Life goes on. We age, acquire jobs, get married, have children. It's in the nature of things that some courses wash out of the mind. But not Professor Behlmer's. Of all the courses I took at my four years at the UW, that seminar was among the most interesting and formative. I still remember the articles he selected for reading (e.g., the juxtaposition of the cliometricians with those historians working in the Freudian tradition, the apparently irreconcilable visions of human nature contained in each of these strands of historical thinking, and the implications for the study of the past). He was an able facilitator of conversations - able to draw out the key dilemmas, the big issues, to summarize, to clarify, to challenge, and above all, to make his students grow.
There are many things I appreciated about Professor Behlmer. One thing that stands out in my mind was his dedication to teaching. He told us that he had his own opinions on the historiographical questions we discussed, but he was very punctilious about not allowing them to show. You sensed that you would get nowhere trying to feed his opinions back to him. He wanted you to know how to think like a historian and justify your positions with the highest standards of evidence. He did not appear to care whether you took one position versus another, provided that you could support your thinking through rigorous argumentation. He was intolerant of ill-conceived positions, of arrogant absolutes and black-and-white arguments. If you took a position, you had better be sure you could answer to the best arguments of the other side because he would certainly notice if you had not! Professor Behlmer was a master of dialectical thinking, helping his students see past the apparent contradictions of two differing positions to the possibility of synthesis. This not only prepared us to be better novice historians, it made us into deeper thinkers (I can still remember when he wrote the names of five or six logical fallacies on the whiteboard in preparation for the day's discussion). He was an immensely learned man, but he did not lord his knowledge over his students. He wanted us to become better historians, and he took his vocation very seriously.
The other thing I really appreciated about Professor Behlmer was his generosity. It is hard being an undergraduate: your ignorance is vast, you're in debt to your eyeballs, and you're trying to sort out some of the most consequential decisions of your life precisely at the time when you have the least experience to guide you. I was deeply unsure of myself - unsure of whether I belonged in the honors program, whether I had the capacity to write my senior thesis, whether I had the capacity to say anything interesting at all. I can still remember the time Professor Behlmer stopped by after one of our seminars to offer some words of encouragement. I recall that he said something to the effect of, "You did a nice job on your paper." Then, as he turned to stride down the hallway back to his office, he cast one intense glance back at me and said, "And I'm a hard ass!" That validation meant a lot to me, and I know it helped build my confidence for the immense project I was about to undertake.
I sensed too that he enjoyed working with undergraduates. We were not annoying distractors to him. He took us seriously, invested his time in our development, and seemed genuinely interested in our ideas. I recall how, in my exit survey, I had suggested how it might be helpful for there to be more consistent grading expectations between professors and graduate assistants, having noticed how the world-weary, harried graduates sometimes graded more punitively than the professors. Professor Behlmer mentioned this suggestion in his speech to our graduating class in 2012. When a few snickers erupted from the graduate students in the front rows, he shot them a stern glance and said, "It's not funny." That a very learned professor, thoroughly established at the top of the academic hierarchy, should care seriously whether kids of 21 or 22 were evaluated fairly, taken seriously as thinkers meant a lot to me.
I'll end with the sense of humor. In one of our seminars, we had brought it to Professor Behlmer's attention that a group email he had sent to the seminar had been routed to the Junk mail folder. This caused some perplexity. After all, why would a professor emailing his class at their official UW email addresses find his important message so devalued by the university's invisible invigilating security? One of the students suggested that perhaps there was something in the subject line that had been flagged as potential spam. When one of the students wondered aloud what could have possibly been in the message to warrant such a screening, another student (let's call him "Jarvis") blurted out, in perfect imitation of junk mail enthusiasm, "Free herbal Viagra!"
Now, was the idea of a venerable professor trading in dubiously legal, pseudoscientific ED medications objectively funny? Yes. But would I, nervous and deferential by nature, have ever dreamed of saying something so cheeky to a person three times my age, formidably learned and thoroughly established at the pinnacle of his discipline? Not once in the age of the universe. So as I sat there at the seminar table, smiling through a pained grimace, waiting to see how Dr. Behlmer would respond, while the rest of the class dissolved into paroxysms of laughter, Professor Behlmer simply said, "Oh, Jarvis," and gave a riddling smile that seemed to indicate either that he would laugh the inappropriate comment off with good humor, or that Jarvis was about to disappear suddenly from the seminar under suspicious circumstances. It seemed to be the former. Whether Jarvis was reprimanded, read the riot act, or referred to the administrative building for the bureaucratic equivalent of tar and feathering, the class proceeded normally and under good terms. That was only one such incident. There were many others. But though Dr. Behlmer was a serious man, I could tell that he was not without a sense of humor.
These are the most conspicuous memories. The rest are buried in the subconscious, beneath the weight of years. I truly appreciated the time I got to spend as his student. Strange as it might sound, I think about his class often even though life has taken me on a different career path. I've often wondered how he had spent the remaining years of his career and whether he continued to teach that seminar. There are a few teachers who stick with you. He was one of them. In the nightmarish unreality of the Trump years, I had often wondered what he would have said, how he might have explained the inexplicable, or at least, pointed me towards the path to understanding. Through the hysteria and heated emotions of the present, I sensed he would have said something thoughtful. Above all, something enriched with a deep historical understanding. I am the better person for the traces he has left on my consciousness. No man is an island, as John Donne wrote. We might not know where the ripples of our generous and virtuous actions go, but they go somewhere. And by them we are sustained, one and all.
Thank you, Dr. Behlmer for your class and for your letter of recommendation to graduate school. I will remember you fondly.
Mark Horan-Spatz
Everett, WAI was in some of Professor Behlmer’s first classes at the UW, as he lit a fire in a group of us about the Social History in the UK. While he took on standard dates and leadership of Britain, he always returned to the gritty, important, stories of marginalized people. Saddened to hear of his passing.
Christine Charbonneau
Seattle, WA