Mary Sarotte

Mary Elise Sarotte’s newest book, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, appeared with Princeton University Press on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Financial Times selected it as one of their “Books of the Year” and Foreign Affairs called it a new “classic” on the end of the Cold War. The book has won three prizes: the Robert H. Ferrell Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), for distinguished scholarship on US foreign policy; the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Prize for distinguished scholarship in German and European Studies; and the Marshall Shulman Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS, recently renamed ASEES; co-winner). In addition, the book received reviews in The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and The Wall Street Journal, among three dozen other publications. Sarotte’s previous publications include the books Dealing with the Devil, and German Military Reform and European Security, plus a number of scholarly articles. She has also worked as a journalist for Time, Die Zeit, and The Economist, and appears as a political commentator on the BBC, CNN International and Sky News. Sarotte earned her BA in History and Science at Harvard and her PhD in History at Yale. After graduate school, she served as a White House Fellow, and subsequently joined the faculty of the University of Cambridge. She received tenure there in 2004 and became a member of the Royal Historical Society before returning to the US to teach at USC. Sarotte is a former Humboldt Scholar, a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.