About

 

 

 

 

Daniel Bessner is currently the Annett H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Associate Professor in American Foreign Policy at the University of Washington. He is a member of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and previously held the Joff Hanauer Honors Professorship in Western Civilization.  He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an Associate of the Alameda Institute, and a Contributing Editor at Jacobin. In 2019-2020, he served as a foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.

Daniel is an intellectual historian, and his work has focused on three areas of inquiry: the history and contemporary practice of U.S. foreign relations; the history and theory of liberalism; and, most recently, the history and practice of the entertainment industry.

He is the author of Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (Cornell, 2018), which you may order here. He is also the co-editor, with Nicolas Guilhot, of The Decisionist Imagination: Sovereignty, Social Science, and Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Berghahn, 2019), which you may order here; and the co-editor, with Michael Brenes, of Rethinking U.S. World Power: Domestic Histories of U.S. Foreign Relations (Palgrave, 2024).

In addition to his scholarship, he has published pieces in The New York Times, The Washington PostThe GuardianThe New RepublicThe Nation, n+1, and other venues. In July 2022, he published a cover story in Harper’s Magazine titled “Empire Burlesque: What Comes After the American Century?”

Please see his CV for more information on his publications.

Daniel is also the co-host of the foreign affairs podcast American Prestige, which is produced in partnership with The Nation magazine. He has appeared on several national television shows, including HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher and CNN’s Smerconish.

He can be reached at daniel.bessner@gmail.com.