Richard Drake is chairman of the History Department and teaches modern European history at the University of Montana. He was educated at St. Michael’s College (B.A. 1963), Brown University (M.A. 1965), and the University of California, Los Angeles (Ph.D. 1975). He has taught at UCLA (1973-1976; 1978-1979), UC Irvine (1976-1978), Wellesley College (1979-1980), Princeton University (1980-1982), New York University (summers 1980 and 1981), and since 1982 the University of Montana. He is currently a professor of history and, since 1 January 2007, the chairman of the History Department.
            His book publications include Byzantium for Rome: The Politics of Nostalgia in Umbertian Italy, 1878-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989; winner of the Society for Italian Historical Studies’ Marraro Prize); and The Aldo Moro Murder Case (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995; translated into Italian in 1996 as Il caso Aldo Moro: Una tragedia italiana vista da uno storico americano by Il Saggiatore of Milan). The book was reviewed in more than three dozen publications here and in Europe, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and La Repubblica. The University of Montana named him the Distinguished Scholar of the year for 1996. A five-year update of the Moro book appeared in the June 2001 issue of The Journal of Modern History, “Why the Moro Trials Have Not Settled the Moro Murder Case: A Problem in Political and Intellectual History.” This article was translated into Italian with the title “Cultura della rivoluzione e delitto Moro: Le teorie della cospirazione contro la verità che fa male” and published in the November-December 2001 issue of Nuova Storia Contemporanea. In connection with a project on ideological extremism in Italy, he received a National Endowment for the Humanities research fellowship for the 1999-2000 academic year. Harvard University Press then published Apostles and Agitators: Italy’s Marxist Revolutionary Tradition in 2003. Le Lettere publishing house in Florence will publish an Italian translation of the book in 2007.
            Other major articles and essays include the “Introduction” to A Woman by Sibilla Aleramo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980); “The Theory and Practice of Italian Nationalism, 1900-1906,” The Journal of Modern History (June 1981); “Decadence, Decadentism, and Decadent Romanticism: Towards a Theory of the Decadence,“ The Journal of Contemporary History (January 1982); “Giulio Salvadori and the Catholic Political Tradition in Italy," The Review of Politics (July 1982); “The Red Brigades and the Italian Political Tradition,” in Terrorism in Europe, ed. by Yonah Alexander and Kenneth A. Myers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); “The Red and the Black: Terrorism in Contemporary Italy,”International Political Science Review (July 1984); “Julius Evola and the Ideological Origins of the Radical Right in Contemporary Italy” in Peter H. Merkl ed., Political Violence and Terror: Motifs and Motivations (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1986); "Julius Evola, Radical Fascism, and the Lateran Accords,” The Catholic Historical Review (July 1988); “Sibilla Aleramo and the Peasants of the Agro Romano: A Writer’s Dilemma,” Journal of the History of Ideas (April-June 1990); “Ideology and Terrorism in Italy: Autobiography as a Historical Source,” Terrorism and Political Violence (Summer 1992); and “Italy in the 1960s: A Legacy of Terrorism and Liberation,” South Central Review ((Winter-Spring 2000-winner of the 2000 Kirby Award for the best article published in the South Central Review); “Julius Evola: intellettuale critico,” in Julius Evola: un pensiero per la fine del millennio (Rome: Europa Libreria Editrice, 2001),“Vivere la rivoluzione: Raniero Panzieri, Quaderni Rossi, e la sinistra extraparlamentare,” Nuova Storia Contemporanea, November-December 2003; “Meridionalismo, the Crisis of Liberalism, and the Advent of Marxism in Post-Risorgimento Naples,” The European Legacy, August 2004; “Il seme della violenza: Toni Negri apostolo della rivoluzione nella stagione del terrorismo,” Nuova Storia Contemporanea, November-December 2004; “Italy’s Far Right and the Red Brigades,” in Taming Terrorism, ed. by Anna Reid (London: Policy Exchange, 2005); “The Italian Revolutionary Tradition,” in Italian Politics and Society, no. 60 Spring 2005, and “Combating Italian and Islamic Terrorism: A Comparative Study,” in The Faces of Terrorism, ed. by Sebastian Wojciechowski (Poznan, Poland: Institute of Political Science and Journalism, Adam Mickiewicz University, 2005).
            He has published more than fifty book reviews. They have appeared in The Journal of Modern History, The Catholic Historical Review, The American Historical Review, Terrorism and Political Violence, History of Education Quarterly, Labor History, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Italica, The European Legacy, The Journal of Cold War Studies, The Canadian Journal of History, The Political Science Quarterly, and The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.. He has presented papers at the Mershon Center of Ohio State University, the American Historical Association, the New England Historical Association, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, the American Catholic Historical Association, the Duquesne History Forum, the Department of State in Washington, D. C., the Council of European Studies in Washington, D. C., the Modern Language Association, the Davis Center at Princeton University, the Center for International Studies at Princeton University, the Seminar on Studies in Modern Italy at Columbia University and the International Society for the Study of European Ideas Conference at the University of Navarra in Spain. He has served on the Advisory Council for the Society for the Study of Italian History.
            He worked as an on-screen expert and the chief historical consultant for two television documentaries: “Lucrezia Borgia” for Biography (first televised 3 April 1997) and “The Curse of the Borgias” for Ancient Mysteries (first televised 5 June 1997). Both programs have been rebroadcast on the History Channel numerous times.
            For the past twenty years, he has been the coordinator of the President’s Lecture Series at The University of Montana, under the auspices of which ten speakers representing the full range of fields in the arts, sciences, and the humanities are invited to campus every year. He served as the Faculty Evaluation Committee chairman for the History Department from1996 to 2004. His service to the campus and community includes numerous guest lectures, participation on panels, and op-ed pieces. Among his undergraduate courses are: the Western Civilization Survey: 1715-Present, the Great Historians: From the Ancient Greeks to the Present, Italy from Dante to Napoleon, Italy from Napoleon to the Present, Terrorism from the French Revolution to the Present, Nineteenth-Century European Cultural and Intellectual History, Twentieth-Century Cultural and Intellectual History, and Contemporary Europe. He teaches two graduate-level courses: Modern Europe: The French Revolution to the Present, and European Cultural and Intellectual History: Theory and Practice. He won the Burlington Northern Award for Teaching in 1989, and the graduating seniors of 1991 selected him as the Most Inspirational Teacher. Among his other honors are the Aldo Moro Fellowship (summer 1972), a Fulbright Fellowship to Rome in 1972-1973, and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship in 1982-1983. In 2006, he served on the Fulbright Fellowship screening committee for the Western Region. He is listed in Who’s Who in America and in Who’s Who in American Education.