Arne Westad is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and one of the world's leading experts on the history of the Cold War.  He co-directs LSE IDEAS, is an editor of the journal Cold War History, and the co-editor of the forthcoming three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War.

Professor Westad is the recepient of the 2006 Bancroft Prize, the Michael Harrington Award, and the Akira Iriye International History Book Award.

Arne Westad was born in Norway in 1960.  He studied history, philosophy and modern languages at the University of Oslo and received his PhD in history from the University of North Carolina in 1990.  During the 1980s he worked for several international aid agencies in Southern Africa and in Pakistan.  Professor Westad has taught at the University of North Carolina and at Johns Hopkins University and served for eight years as Director of Research at the Norwegian Nobel Institute.  Since 1998 he has been in the Department of International History at the LSE, where he teaches Cold War history and the history of East Asia.  Professor Westad served as head of department from 2004-07 and is now co-director of LSE IDEAS, a centre for the study of international affairs, diplomacy and grand strategy. 

Westad's main fields of interests are the international history of the Cold War and contemporary East Asian history. At LSE, he teaches courses within these topics and supervises students for their dissertations and theses at all levels, from undergraduate to PhD. 

Professor Westad has published twelve books on international history and contemporary international affairs. His 2006 book The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge University Press) won the Bancroft Prize, the Akira Iriye International History Book Award, and the Michael Harrington Award from the American Political Science Association . Other major books from recent years include The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (OUP, 2003; with Jussi Hanhimaki); Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1945-1950 (Stanford UP, 2003), and Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (Routledge, 2000).

Professor Westad has held visiting fellowships at Cambridge University, Hong Kong University, and New York University, and has been the recipient of major grants from the John D. and Catharine T. MacArthur Foundation and the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. He has served as the international co-ordinator of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Advisory Group on Declassification and Archival Access and has advised several other governments on such issues. In 2000, Professor Westad was awarded the Bernath Lecture Prize from the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations.  

He is married to Dr Ingunn Bjornson, a neurologist and general medical practitioner.  They have two children and live in Cambridge, UK.

a.westad@lse.ac.uk

+44 20 7955 7252