Daniel J. Sargent

Daniel J. Sargent is the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History and Citizenship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds a joint appointment in the Department of History and the Goldman School of Public Policy. A historian of U.S. foreign relations and international history, he serves as Associate Dean of the Goldman School.

His work asks how states and policymakers adapt to long-term transformations in their international environment, and how historical understanding can inform the practice of policy. He previously co-directed Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies.

He is the author of A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford University Press, 2015) and of numerous articles and chapters. He is a co-editor of The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Harvard University Press, 2010) and History’s Dead-Hand Grip (Hoover Institution Press, 2026). His current book, Pax Americana: The Past, Present, and Prospects of the American World Order, under contract with Princeton University Press, sets the American effort to build order in world politics in five centuries of perspective.

He received his PhD in History from Harvard University in 2008 and his BA, with double first-class honors, from the University of Cambridge in 2001. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at International Security Studies at Yale and the William C. Bark National Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

His work has been recognized by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, which awarded him its Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize and gave A Superpower Transformed an honorable mention for the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize. He has delivered the O. Meredith Wilson Lecture in History at the University of Utah and held the Harold Strom Visiting Professorship at the University of Toronto.