Born and raised in Salem, Oregon, Dr. Gary Girod received his Bachelor of Arts in History and French from Chapman Univesity in Orange County, California. After taking time off to live and work in southern France for a year, he returned to California to work as a researcher for newsman Joel Kotkin. Their work appeared in Newsweek, Reuters, Forbes, and the Orange County Register, among other national and international news venues. Dr. Girod completed his Ph.D. from the University of Houston in 2021. Routledge published his book Domestic Surveillance and Social Control in Britain and France during World War I. He is also the founder and host of “The French History Podcast,” a large-scale digital and public history project presented by the world’s leading scholars of French history. He is currently working on founding “Our Nowhere: Panhandle Histories,” a podcast detailing the history of the Oklahoma/Texas Panhandle region.
In his free time, Dr. Girod enjoys literature, traveling, sports, and hiking in nature. He is also a fiction author, with a dozen short stories in print and two novels published by Canadian-press Brain Lag.