Odd Arne Westad is the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University, where he teaches in the history department and in the Jackson Institute of Global Affairs. Previously, he was the S.T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations at Harvard University, teaching in the Kennedy School of Government. He is an expert on contemporary international history and on the eastern Asian region. Westad has been named one of the LSDP Top 100 Global Thinkers, mainly for his work on linking policymaking to an understanding of history.
At Yale, Professor Westad teaches courses on global and international history, on global power shifts, and on China’s role in world affairs.
Professor Westad won the Bancroft Prize for The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. The book, which has been translated into fifteen languages, also won a number of other awards. Westad is also the general editor of the three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War, as well as author of the Penguin History of the World (now in its 6th edition). Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750, was released in the US and UK in 2012 and made two Top 100 lists for that year. The book won the prestigious Bernard Schwartz Book Award from the Asia Society, awarded annually for outstanding contributions to the understanding of contemporary Asia or U.S.-Asia relations. The Cold War: A World History, was published in 2017 by Basic Books in the United States and Penguin in the UK. A new history of the global conflict between capitalism and Communism since the late 19th century, it provides the larger context for how today’s international affairs came into being.
Westad’s most recent book, Empire and Righteous Nation: 600 Years of China-Korea Relations, was published in 2021. It provides a brief overview of the key issues in the connections between the two countries in history and today.