Professional Affiliation

Ottilie Springer Professor of History, Brandeis University; as of Summer 2018, Professor of History, Yale University

Expert Bio

David C. Engerman is Ottilie Springer Professor and Chair of the History Department at Brandeis University, where he has taught international history and modern American history since receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1998. He was the 2016 President of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations. He has published two books on Russia/USSR in American intellectual and political life: Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard, 2003) and Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of American Soviet Experts (Oxford, 2009). His most recent book, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India, will be published by Harvard University Press in February 2018. His current research explores the global politics of economic inequality in the 1970s. Beginning in the summer of 2018, Dr. Engerman will be Professor of History at Yale University.

Wilson Center Project

"The Global Politics of the Modern: India and the Three Worlds of the Cold War"

Project Summary

Dr. Engerman's previous project at the Wilson Center, "Know Your Enemy," examined the central role that the USSR played in 20th century American thought. Many of the terms that described and defined American thought and policy in the Cold War took shape through intellectual encounters with the Soviet Union.

Previous Terms

Kennan Institute Short-Term Scholar, July 2005, "Know Your Enemy: American Sovietology and the Making of the Cold War"; Kennan Institute Short-Term Scholar, June 1997, "America, Russia and the Romance of Economic Development"