A Pulitzer Prize recipient, Walter McDougall is a graduate of Amherst College and a Vietnam veteran. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1974 and taught at U.C. Berkeley for 13 years before coming to Penn to direct its International Relations Program.

McDougall, a professor of history, teaches U.S., European, and Asia/Pacific diplomatic history and is the author of many books, most recently The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How American Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest; Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877; and Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828. His other books include Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With the World Since 1776; Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur; and …the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. McDougall is also Director of Research and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.