Daniel Bessner

Daniel Bessner (Ph.D., Duke University) is the Anne H.H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He spent the 2015-2016 academic year as an International Security and U.S. Foreign Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding and the 2013-2014 academic year as 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.

Daniel is also co-editing a book with Nicolas Guilhot provisionally entitled The Decisionist Imagination: Sovereignty, Social Science, and Democracy in the Twentieth Century, which is under advance contract with Berghahn Books. In addition, Daniel has published articles in several journals, including The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, International Security, The Intellectual History Review, among others. His research has further been supported by the de Kármán Fellowship Trust, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the German Historical Institute, and other organizations. In 2014, the International Society for Intellectual History awarded him the Charles Schmitt Prize for Best Article written by a graduate student or scholar within two years of receiving the Ph.D. for an essay on Murray Rothbard and modern libertarianism. He can be reached at dbessner@uw.edu.