Sean McMeekin is the Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College. Born in Idaho and raised in Rochester, New York, he received his Ph.D. and M.A. in History from the University of California at Berkeley and his B.A. in History, Phi Beta Kappa with Highest Honors, from Stanford University. He has also taught at Yale University; at Koç University, in Istanbul, Turkey; at Bilkent University, in Ankara; at New York University; and at UC Berkeley. McMeekin has lived for extended periods in France, Germany, Russia, and Turkey, speaks five languages fluently, and has worked in more than forty distinct archives in twelve different countries.
McMeekin is the author of nine books, including To Overthrow the World. The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism (Basic Books, 2024), which won the Hayek Prize and the ISI Book of the Year Prize; Stalin’s War. A New History of World War II (Basic Books, 2021) and The Russian Revolution. A New History (Basic Books, 2017), both of which stimulated wide-ranging debate and continue to sell briskly; The Ottoman Endgame. War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Penguin Press, 2015), awarded the Arthur Goodzeit Book Prize; July 1914: Countdown to War (Basic Books, 2013), reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review; The Russian Origins of the First World War (Harvard University Press/Belknap, 2011), which won the Norman B. Tomlinson Jr. Book Prize; The Berlin to Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898–1918 (Penguin UK and Harvard/Belknap, 2010), winner of the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize; History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks (Yale University Press, 2008), listed for the Ed Hewett Book Prize; and The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West (Yale UP, 2004).
McMeekin’s op-eds and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal Europe, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books, Compact magazine, The World Today, Historically Speaking, the Federalist, Commentary, Current History, The American Interest and the American Conservative. McMeekin also reviews books for the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, The Literary Review, The American Historical Review, History Today, the Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review, and The Journal of Cold War Studies. He lives in Clermont, New York, in the upper Hudson Valley, with his wife and two teenage children.
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