David Clay Large

Job title: 
Professor, Fromm Institute, University of San Francisco
Bio/CV: 

David Clay Large is currently a professor at the Fromm Institute, University of San Francisco, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies, UC Berkeley.  Previously he taught at Berkeley, Smith College, Montana State University, and Yale University, where he was also Dean of Pierson College.

A specialist on the history of Modern Europe, especially Germany and Austria, Large has published widely in that field.  Among his major book publications are The Politics of Law and Order: A History of the Bavarian Einwohnerwehr (1980); Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (1984); Contending with Hitler: Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich (1992); Between Two Fires: Europe’s Path in the 1930s (1993); Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era (1996); Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich (1997); Berlin (2000); And the World Closed Its Doors: One Family’s Abandonment to the Holocaust (2003); Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936 (2007); and Munich 1972: Tragedy, Terror and Triumph at the Olympic Games (2012).  Presently, Large is completing a cultural and social history of the major Central European spa-towns.

Over the course of his forty-year career as a teacher and scholar, Large has been awarded major fellowships from many institutions, including the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Morse Faculty Fund of Yale University, and the German Marshal Fund.

An avid skier and hiker, Large divides his time between San Francisco and Bozeman, Montana.  He is married to Margaret Wheeler, a UCSF clinical professor; he has a son, Joshua, who teaches Latin American History in Colombia, and a daughter, Alma Esmeralda.