John S. Conway (historian)


John Seymour Conway was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of British Columbia, where he taught for almost 40 years. His work focused on the role of the Vatican and German churches during the Holocaust; on 20th-century Christian–Jewish relations; and on the Holocaust in Hungary and Slovakia.
Author of the landmark study The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933–1945, Conway was one of the founding contributors, in 1970, to the Scholars' Conference on the Church Struggles and the Holocaust. He was awarded the Queen's Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977.

Early life and education

Conway was born, one of three boys, in London, England, to Elsie Conway, a marine biologist, and her husband. He came from a family that prized education. His mother was a graduate of Glasgow University; his father had graduated from Cambridge. Conway's paternal grandfather was the classicist Robert Seymour Conway. Katharine Glasier, the teacher and Independent Labour Party politician, was his great aunt.
After attending Sedbergh School, an independent school in Cumbria, Conway joined the British Army in 1948 as a conscript, working in intelligence in Austria. After being allowed to leave the army six months early to pursue his studies, he began reading English literature at St John's College, Cambridge, before switching to history. He completed both his BA and PhD at St John's.

Career

In 1955 Conway moved to Canada and taught international relations at the University of Manitoba. He had to return to England to defend his thesis and met his wife, Ann, on the boat on the way back to Canada. In 1957 Conway joined the history department at the University of British Columbia in 1957, teaching modern European history and international relations. His 474-page study, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933–1945, was published in 1968 in London by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The book examined the position of several Christian churches during the Third Reich, including the Catholics, Methodists, Baptists and Jehovah's Witnesses. Conway also wrote papers on the role of the government and Jewish organizations during the Holocaust in Hungary and Slovakia, and about Rudolf Vrba, the Auschwitz escapee. On the role of the churches, he wrote:
Conway spent nearly 40 years at UBC; he was appointed professor emeritus when he retired in 1995. In 1998 he became the Smallman Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario. He sat on the editorial boards of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte and the Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies; from 1995 he was also director of the Association of Contemporary Church Historians and editor of their newsletter. He delivered a lecture at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in 1993.
Conway was a member of the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster's Refugee Liaison Committee. On the UBC campus, he had been long associated with the Student Christian Movement, and the World University Service of Canada, for which he acted for many years as faculty advisor. He was a member of St James' Anglican Parish, Vancouver.

Selected works