stephen wertheim
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Stephen Wertheim is a historian of the United States in the world. He is
Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quincy
Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which he co-founded. He is
also a Research Scholar at the Saltzman
Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.
Stephen specializes in U.S. foreign relations
and international order from the late nineteenth century to the present. In his
book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S.
Global Supremacy, he reveals how U.S. leaders made a sudden and
unexpected decision to pursue global military dominance, which they had
previously regarded as unnecessary at best and imperialistic at worst.
Stephen regularly writes essays on current affairs. His pieces have
appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign
Policy, The Guardian, The
Nation, The New York Review of Books, The
New York Times, The New Yorker, The
Washington Post, and elsewhere.
In 2020, Prospect magazine named him one of “the
world’s 50 top thinkers for the Covid-19 age.”
Stephen has also published scholarly articles on a range of subjects,
including grand strategy, international law, world organization, colonial
empire, and humanitarian intervention. His
research on the intellectual origins of the League of Nations won the Fischel-Calhoun Prize from the Society for Historians
of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
He was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University; a
permanent Lecturer in History at Birkbeck,
University of London; a Junior Research Fellow at King’s College, University
of Cambridge, where he was a fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International
Law; and a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Values and Public
Policy at Princeton University, where he was part of the University Center for Human Values
and the Niehaus Center for
Globalization and Governance.
Stephen received a PhD with distinction from Columbia University in
2015. Stephen received an MPhil from Columbia in 2011 and an AB summa cum laude from Harvard
University in 2007.
In his spare time, Stephen thinks up comedy ideas, talks about them, and fails to carry them out.