Fredrik Logevall

Fredrik Logevall is a Swedish-American historian and educator at Harvard University, where he is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

He is a specialist in U.S. politics and foreign policy.

Logevall was previously the Stephen and Madeline Anbinder Professor of History at Cornell University, where he also served as vice provost and as director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

His most recent book, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 (2020), won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Logevall’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, Daily Beast, and Foreign Affairs, among other publications.

His book, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 (2020), won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography.

Fredrik Logevall was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1963, and grew up in Västerås.

He emigrated with his family to Vancouver, British Columbia as a youth and before entering Simon Fraser University.

He went on to earn an MA in history from the University of Oregon and a PhD in U.S. foreign relations history from Yale University, where he studied under Gaddis Smith and Paul Kennedy.

He then taught for eleven years at University of California, Santa Barbara, where, with Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, he co-founded the university's Center for Cold War Studies.

In addition, for previous studies, Logevall received the Stuart L. Bernath book, article, and lecture prizes as well as the Warren F. Kuehl Book Prize (2001) from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations; and the W. Turrentine Jackson Book Award, Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association (2000).

Logevall has published numerous books and articles on U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era, including:

In 2004, he moved to Cornell University and assumed his present position at Harvard in 2015.

Logevall is a former president of the Society for Historians for American Foreign Relations.

Logevall has lectured widely around the world on topics relating to diplomatic history and contemporary U.S. politics and foreign policy, and has won numerous honors for his work.

His book, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (2012), received the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Library in Paris Book Award.

He won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam.