Quick Facts
Biography
Fredrik Logevall (born 1963) is a Swedish-American historian and educator at Harvard University, where he is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Professor of History in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is a specialist in U.S. foreign policy and the Vietnam Wars. He was previously the Stephen and Madeline Anbinder Professor of History at Cornell University, where he also served as vice provost and as director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. He won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam.
Biography
Fredrik Logevall was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1963, and lived thereafter in Västerås. He emigrated with his family to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada as a youth and graduated with a BA in political science from Simon Fraser University. Thereafter he earned an MA in History from the University of Oregon and a PhD in U.S. foreign relations history from Yale University, where he studied under Gaddis Smith, in 1993. He then taught for eleven years at University of California, Santa Barbara, where he co-founded (with Tsuyoshi Hasegawa) the University of California, Santa Barbara Center for Cold War Studies. In 2004 he moved to Cornell University as Professor of History. In 2006-07 Logevall was Leverhulme Visiting Professor of History at University of Nottingham and Mellon Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. In 2010 he became director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University and the John S. Knight Professor of International Studies.
Logevall is also an associate of the London School of Economics IDEAS Cold War Studies Programme, and he serves on the advisory board of the Presidential Recordings Project at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia. He is on the editorial board of The Sixties journal, and of the book series, “Issues in the History of American Foreign Relations,” Potomac Books (General Editor: Robert McMahon), and he is on the editorial advisory board of H-DIPLO as well as the Cornell International Affairs Review. With Christopher Goscha he is the co-editor of the series "From Indochina to Vietnam: Revolution and War in a Global Perspective," with University of California Press.
Logevall has lectured widely around the world on topics relating to diplomatic history and contemporary U.S. foreign policy, and has won numerous honors for his work. Among other awards, he has received the Stuart L. Bernath book, article, and lecture prizes as well as the Warren F. Kuehl Book Prize (2001) from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations; and the W. Turrentine Jackson Book Award, Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association (2000). He was also selected as a "Top Young Historian" by History News Network. A dedicated teacher, Logevall received the UCSB Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Prize for the Humanities and Fine Arts in 1998.
Selected works
Logevall has published numerous books and articles on U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era, including:
- Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam (Random House, 2012). Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize; finalist for the 2013 Cundill Prize
- A People and A Nation: A History of the United States, 9th ed. (co-authored, with Mary Beth Norton et al.; Cengage, 2011).
- America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (co-authored with Campbell Craig; Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009; paperback February 2012).
- Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969-1977 (co-edited, with Andrew Preston; Oxford University Press, 2008).
- The First Vietnam War: Colonial and Cold War Crisis(co-edited, with Mark A. Lawrence; Harvard University Press, 2007).
- Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy: Studies in the Principal Movements and Ideas, revised ed. (co-edited, with Alexander DeConde and Richard Dean Burns; Scribners, 2002).
- Terrorism and 9/11: A Reader (edited; Houghton Mifflin, 2002).
- The Origins of the Vietnam War (Longman, 2001).
- Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 1999; paperback March 2001).