Dr. Weber started at SMU in 1976. (Photo courtesy of SMU News)
SMU history Professor Dr. David J. Weber, one of the nation’s leading scholars on the Southwest U.S. and Mexico, died Aug. 20 of myeloma at the age of 69.
After joining SMU’s department of history in 1976, Dr. Weber chaired the department from 1979 to 1986 and held the Robert and Nancy Dedman Chair in History in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.
He was also the founding director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, known to be a leading institute for the study of the American West and the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.
Benjamin Johnson, interim director of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies, remembers Dr. Weber for all that he brought to the Center.
“Weber was, above all, a humanist, in both his professional and private lives. He had a profoundly empathetic imagination which he used to recapture worlds from the past lost to us, and which made him one of the most influential and most admired historians of his generation,” Johnson said.
Dr. Weber led the history department’s new Ph.D. program as well, while also making time to act as a mentor to graduate students and post-doctoral fellows awarded stipends to conduct research and publish their manuscripts through the Center.
As the author or editor of over 70 scholarly articles and 27 books, Dr. Weber continued his research and writing after his retirement from teaching in spring 2010.
Dr. Weber was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. Named to membership in the Real Orden de Isabel la Católica by King Juan Carlos of Spain in 2002, he was the Spanish equivalent of a knight. In 2005, Mexico named him to the Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca (the Order of the Aztec Eagle). Dr. Weber was one of a few U.S. historians to be elected to the Mexican Academy of History.
Dr. Weber held numerous fellowships including ones from the Huntington Library, American Philosophical Society, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the Lamar Center at Yale.
All of these are well-deserved, according to Johnson.
“More than any other figure of his time, he documented the deep ties between Mexican and American history,” he said. “In (an) age where one of every four Americans will soon be of Hispanic descent, we are finally coming to realize what he knew all along.”
He is the former president of both the Western History Association (1990-91) and the Conference of U.S.-Mexico historians (1990). Later, he served on the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians and as the vice president of the Professional Division of the American Historical Association.
Dr. Weber received SMU’s Willis M. Tate Distinguished Teaching Award in 2010.
After earning his Ph.D. in Latin American history at the University of New Mexico, Dr. Weber taught at San Diego State University (1967-76) , and then at the Universidad de Costa Rica as a Fullbright Lecturer (1970). He was also a visiting professor at Harvard University in 2002.
Plans for a service in Dallas are pending.
