Daniel Bessner

Daniel Bessner (PhD, Duke University) is an Associate Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He spent the 2015-2016 academic year as a postdoctoral fellow in international security and U.S. foreign policy at Dartmouth College’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding. In 2013-2014, he was a foreign policy, security studies, and diplomatic history postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Daniel works on intellectual and cultural history, U.S. foreign relations, and the history of the human sciences. He is completing a book manuscript, provisionally entitled Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual, which is under contract with the United States in the World series at Cornell University Press. The book examines the impact of German exiles from National Socialism on the culture, institutions, and foreign policies of the postwar United States.

Daniel’s research has appeared in the Intellectual History Review, the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, International Security, Religions, Armed Forces & Society, Terrorism and Political Violence, and several edited collections. In 2014, the International Society for Intellectual History awarded him the Charles Schmitt Prize for Best Article by a Young Historian for an essay on Murray Rothbard and modern libertarianism. Daniel’s book reviews have appeared in the Journal of Modern History, Technology and Culture, H-Diplo, and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. His research has also been funded by the George C. Marshall Foundation, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the German Historical Institute, the Josephine de Kármán Fellowship Trust, and other organizations.