Melvyn Leffler

Edward Stettinius Professor of History, University of Virginia

Melvyn P. Leffler is the Edward Stettinius Emeritus Professor of American History at The University of Virginia. He is the author of several books on the Cold War, including For the Soul of Mankind (2007), which won the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association, and A Preponderance of Power (1993), which won the Bancroft, Hoover, and Ferrell Prizes. In 2010, he and Odd Arne Westad co-edited the three volume Cambridge History of the Cold War. Leffler was the Harmsworth Professor at Oxford in 2002-3, and previously served as president of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations. Princeton University Press published a collection of his essays and articles in 2017, called Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920-2015. His newest book, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq, was published by Oxford University Press in March 2023.