As a graduate student at Cornell University during the 1960s, William Wallace '68 wrote his thesis on the revival of Great Britain's Liberal Party. Now he is serving that party in Parliament.

On Dec. 20, Wallace became a peer in the House of Lords, where he will advise house members on foreign policy, defense and European issues and examine legislation from the Parliament's other house, the House of Commons. Also recently named peers were five Conservatives, four members of the Labour Party, and one fellow Liberal Democrat, their numbers dictated by the number of seats each party controls in the House of Commons. Of a total of 1,000 peers -- who hold lifetime appointments -- approximately 400 are currently practicing, Wallace said.

Britain's political parties submitted their nominations for peers to the prime minister last fall. Those nominations were then considered and approved by an all-party committee, before formal approval by the queen. Wallace said one of his party's goals is to make the House of Lords an elected body. "Overwhelmingly, for me, the most important issue is next year's intergovernmental conference on the future of the European Union and the question of its enlargement to include Eastern Europe," Wallace said. "I am particularly looking forward to getting involved in the whole debate about the future of Europe and Britain's role in the future of Europe." Wallace will lend considerable expertise to the House of Lords, both political and pedagogical. He first joined the Liberal Party in 1960 and is a longtime national officer. "I was puzzled by the narrow outcome of the 1964 election," he recalled, "watching it at a distance from Ithaca, and decided to write my thesis on the revival of the Liberal Party since its near collapse in the early 1950s." He has been involved in every general election since 1966, on five occasions as a candidate and on three as part of the national campaign team.

In addition, Wallace has been a professor of international studies at Central European University in Prague and Budapest since July 1994 and a Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics since October 1995. He will continue teaching in the mornings and will serve in the House of Lords four afternoons a week, 30 weeks a year. He also has held visiting positions at the French Institute for International Relations and at Freiburg, Columbia and Harvard universities. He was the Walter F. Hallstein Senior Research Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford University, from 1990 through 1995; research director for the Transatlantic Policy Network from 1992 to 1994; and director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London from 1978 to 1990. He received an honorary degree from the Free University of Brussels in 1992 and was named a chevalier of the Order of Merit by the French government in 1995.

A native of Leicester, England, Wallace first visited Cornell in 1962 for a year of study while enrolled at Cambridge University. He chose to pursue a Ph.D. in political science at Cornell, where his thesis committee chair was Mario Einaudi, founder of Cornell's Center for International Studies, and his adviser was Theodore J. Lowi, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions.