Zoltan Feher

Zoltan Feher is a Postdoctoral Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy and U.S.-China Relations at the University of Public Service’s Institute for American Studies in Budapest, Hungary. He also serves in several other concurrent appointments, including as a Nonresident Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, an Associate Research Fellow at the Hungarian Institute for International Affairs, and a Geostrategy Consultant at Sanimoon Research.

Zoltan was an America in the World Consortium Predoctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at The University of Texas at Austin, a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow with the Notre Dame International Security Center at the University of Notre Dame, while he pursued his Ph.D. in International Relations at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. From 2020-2022, he was a World Politics and Statecraft Fellow with the Smith Richardson Foundation.

Previously, he worked as a professional diplomat for his home country Hungary for 12 years, serving as foreign policy analyst at the Hungarian embassy in Washington DC, and later as Hungary’s Deputy Ambassador and Acting Ambassador in Turkey. He holds a Master of Arts in Political Science and a Master of Arts in American History from Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest), a Law degree (J.D.) from Pázmány Catholic University (Budapest), and a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University.

He has taught International Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Summer School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Fletcher School, Ivy League Summer Institute (at the Harvard Law School), and leading Hungarian universities. In 2016, he served as a teaching assistant to Joseph Nye at the Harvard Kennedy School. In 2019, he taught his self-designed course What is Grand Strategy? at Tufts University’s Political Science Department. He has studied with Stephen Walt, Monica Toft, Richard Rosecrance, Robert Pfaltzgraff, Niall Ferguson, and Nicholas Burns. From 2017 to 2021, he worked as a Research Fellow at The Fletcher School’s Center for Strategic Studies.

His dissertation, The Sources of American Conduct: U.S. Strategy, China’s Rise, and International Order, examines U.S. strategy vis-à-vis China in the early post-Cold War period, focusing on how and why the United States ended up facilitating China’s rise. His theory has implications for understanding why established great powers often help the emergence of rising states that may over time become peer competitors.