David C. Engerman

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David C. Engerman is a professor of history at Brandeis University, where he has taught international history and modern American history since receiving his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. Building on his earlier scholarship on American programs of development aid in the “Third World,” he is currently conducting research on American and Soviet aid to India in the 1950s and 1960s.

Using sources from more than a dozen archives in four countries, Engerman will explore the ways in which superpower aid competition in newly independent nations revealed important elements—and key contradictions—of the global Cold War. This project is also supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Kennan Institute.

A revised version of Engerman’s Berkeley dissertation was published as Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard University Press, 2003); it won the Stuart Bernath and Akira Iriye Prizes and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He has also published Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford University Press, 2009), written the foreword for a new edition of The God That Failed (Columbia University Press, 2001), and coedited two collections of essays on modernization and development programs. Engerman was named a Top Young Historian by the History News Network and was awarded the Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.