Walter Allan McDougall is Professor of History and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania where he directs a program with more than 350 students majoring in diplomatic history and international affairs. Born in Washington, D.C., Dr. McDougall grew up near Chicago. He graduated from Amherst College, served in Vietnam with the U.S. Army artillery, and returned to the University of Chicago for his Ph.D., studying under William McNeill. Dr. McDougall taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1975 to 1987, during which time he received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Center and the National Air and Space Museum and advised the U.S. Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment (1982-84) and the Harvard/Carnegie Study on the Prevention of Nuclear War. Dr. McDougall’s book The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age won the Pulitzer Prize and the Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology in 1986. His other publications include: France’s Rhineland Diplomacy, 1914-1924; The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe; Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur; Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776; and Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1977.

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