Fredrik Logevall

Fredrik Logevall 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. politics and foreign policy. Logevall 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. His most recent book, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 (2020), won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Fredrik Logevall
Fredrik Logevall speaks at the Miller Center of Public Affairs in 2013
Born	1963 Stockholm, Sweden
Alma mater	Simon Fraser University (BA), University of Oregon (MA), Yale University (PhD)

Logevall’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, Daily Beast, and Foreign Affairs, among other publications.

Biography

Fredrik Logevall was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1963, and grew up in Västerås. He emigrated with his family to Vancouver, British Columbia as a youth and before entering Simon Fraser University. He went on to earn 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 and Paul Kennedy. He then taught for eleven years at University of California, Santa Barbara, where, with Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, he co-founded the university's Center for Cold War Studies. In 2004, he moved to Cornell University and assumed his present position at Harvard in 2015.

Logevall is a former president of the Society for Historians for American Foreign Relations.

Awards

Logevall has lectured widely around the world on topics relating to diplomatic history and contemporary U.S. politics and foreign policy, and has won numerous honors for his work. His book, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (2012), received the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Library in Paris Book Award. His book, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 (2020), won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. In 2023, Netflix began developing a TV series on Kennedy's life based on Logevall's biography. Logevall is also a recipient of the Stuart L. Bernath book, article, and lecture prizes, 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).

Selected works

Logevall has published numerous books and articles on U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era, including:

• JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 (Random House, 2020).
• 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, 11th ed. (co-authored, Jane Kamensky 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).

Further reading

• Logevall, Fredrik. "Contingent Histories" H-DIPLO, March 2, 2021, online, autobiographical essay.
• Pach, Chester; Ewing, Cindy; Kim, Kevin Y.; Bessner, Daniel; Logevall, Fredrik. "A Roundtable on Daniel Bessner and Fredrik Logevall, 'Recentering the United States in the Historiography of American Foreign Relations'" Passport: The Newsletter of the SHAFR (Sept 2020), Vol. 51 Issue 2, pp 39–44

External links

• Appearances on C-SPAN