Susan Pedersen

Fellow, SCAS.
Gouverneur Morris Professor of British History, Columbia University

Susan Pedersen received her B.A., M.A., and PhD from Harvard University, where she was a
member of the faculty from 1988 to 2003 and, for a time, Dean for Undergraduate Education.
She joined the history department at Columbia University, New York City, in 2003. She teaches
and supervises graduate students in British, European and international history, and co-directs the
“New York-Cambridge Training Collaboration in Modern British History,” which brings together
students and scholars from the University of Cambridge, Columbia University and New York Uni-
versity. 

Pedersen has written widely on British, European and international politics after 1900. Her first
book examined the way in which European welfare states came to account for dependence; her
second book recovered the political career and visionary thought of the feminist and social reformer
Eleanor Rathbone. In 2014, she delivered the Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford on the
subject of “Internationalism and Empire: British Dilemmas, 1919–1939”(available here). She is a
regular contributor to the London Review of Books. Pedersen’s latest book, The Guardians: The
League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015), was awarded the
2015 Cundill History Prize for historical literature.

At the Swedish Collegium, she will be working on a book about the linked political and sexual
crises of the British fin de siècle, as seen through two marriages in the Balfour family.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2021-22.