Pierre Henri Laurent

Pierre-Henri Laurent of Wellesley Hills, MA passed away peacefully in his sleep on Sunday, November 14, 2021. A son of a Belgian medieval economics historian, Henri Laurent, at The Free University of Brussels and his mother, Harriet Moriarty, an Irish-American teacher/professor and government official, he was born in Fall River, MA in 1933 while his father did research at Harvard University. With his parents returning to Belgium, he resided there until the Second World War and the invasion in 1940. After his father was killed by Nazis for his anti-Fascist writings, his mother led their two children to the US, and Pierre learned his English first in Lewiston, ME while his mother taught at Bates College, and then on the streets of New York City and the Horace Mann School, then the Teachers College at Columbia University. When his mother moved from academe to government employment in Washington, he went to the Sidwell Friends School. After graduation from the Loomis School in CT and then Colgate University in the fifties, he served in the United States Air Force and the Strategic Air Command in an intelligence capacity. He married Virginia Brayton in 1958 and entered Boston University for both his Masters and Ph.D degrees in Modern European History in the early sixties. He taught at Boston University, Sweet Briar College, University of Wisconsin at Madison and Tulane University until 1970 when he began his thirty-three years at Tufts University in Medford, MA. At Tufts he was the History Department chair and director of the International Relations Programs, the author of numerous articles, essays in more than two dozen books and the editor and co-editor of four books on European Union History. He was the recipient of two Fulbright awards (one for teaching at the College of Europe at Bruges and one for research) a Paul-Henri Spaak Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities award, and a NATO Fellowship in the Humanities among others. During the early eighties, he served on the Educational Testing Service review committee evaluating the Advanced Placement European History programs that resulted in the introduction of the Document Based Question (DBQ) into both of the then AP testing systems. His teaching centered on 19th and 20th- century European diplomatic, political and economic history and much of his scholarship on the European Union Studies Association. This led him in the eighties to be one of the founders and early leaders of the new European Union Studies Association.

In his retirement years he proudly served on the Town of Wellesley Historical Commission and as a volunteer for first The Hospice of the Good Shepherd in Newton and then the Wayside Hospice in Wayland, and with Prisoner Visitation and Support at the Federal Bureau of Prisons Medical Center in Devens. He was a member of First Unitarian Universalist Society of Newton. He was adored by his family and friends and will be greatly missed.

He is survived by his beloved wife of 63 years, Virginia of Wellesley Hills, his son Paul Laurent and wife Lorna of Natick, MA and their children Katherine, Alec and Elizabeth, his son Bradford Laurent and wife Dayse of Marlborough, MA and Brads’ daughter Francesca Ober-Laurent, his daughter Nicole Kern and husband Michael of Rockport, MA and their children Patrick and Sean, his daughter Alexa O’Toole and husband John of Wellesley, MA and their children Jackson and Cameron, and his sister Marie-Jeanne Aguiar and husband Manuel of West Hartford, CT and their daughters Lauren and Jessica. He was predeceased by his infant daughter Amy Ruth.

A memorial service will be held at a later date.