Dr Charlie Laderman

Dr Charlie Laderman is Senior Lecturer in International History. He is part of the core team responsible for directing the Centre for Grand Strategy. Before joining KCL, he was a research fellow at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, where he remains a senior research associate. In 2016–17, he was a Harrington Faculty Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin and in 2021-22, he was a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

His latest book is Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and German’'s March to Global War (Basic Books, 2021). Co-written with Brendan Simms, it explores the most crucial period in 20th-century diplomatic history, the days between Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor and Adolf Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States. It was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and has been shortlisted for the Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History. It has also been reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, Guardian, The Times, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman and Foreign Affairs.

His first monograph, Sharing the Burden (Oxford University Press, 2019), explored the American and British response to the Armenian Genocide. It offers a window into America’s rise to great-power status, the decline of the British Empire, and the emergence of a new Anglo-American-led international order after World War I. It was awarded the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s H. Wayne Morgan Prize in Political History, and the Arthur Miller Institute Prize from the British Association for American Studies. It was short-listed for the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize in British History and received highly distinguished entry citation for the Transatlantic Studies Association book prize. He is also co-author, with Brendan Simms, of Donald Trump: The Making of a Worldview (I.B. Tauris, 2017), which was reviewed and cited in The Financial Times, The Irish Times, The Atlantic, Politico and National Interest.

Throughout his time at KCL he has worked to apply deep historical knowledge to contemporary political concerns. He has published articles on global affairs in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, History Today and The New Statesman, among other publications, and provided commentary for the BBC.

Laderman completed his undergraduate studies in history and politics at the University of Nottingham. He won the University of Cambridge’s Member’s History Prize for best MPhil dissertation before completing his PhD at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. During his PhD studies, he was a Fox International Fellow and a Smith Richardson Fellow in International Security Studies, both at Yale University, and an AHRC Fellow at the Kluge Center, Library of Congress.

Research Interests

His research focuses on the United States and its relations with the wider world, with an emphasis on the intersection between U.S. and International History, and the interconnection between U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics.

In addition, his research encompasses transatlantic relations, the foreign policy of Great Britain, and the development of ideas on human rights, grand strategy and global order.

He is open to supervising PhDs in American and British history, with a particular focus on international relations and foreign policy.

Teaching

Dr Laderman currently teaches and convenes the following modules:

• 5SSW2064 The Long View: Understanding International Relations through History
• 6SSW3047 (BA) and 7SSWN204 (MA) - The United States and China

Publications 

Book

• Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War (Basic Books and Allen Lane, 2021) Available here (UK) and here (US).
• Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2019). Read extract.
• Co-written with Brendan Simms, Donald Trump: The Making of a Worldview (I.B. Tauris, 2017) Available here. Read extract

Selected recent Articles and Chapters

• ‘The United States and the Origins of the Modern Middle East,’ in The Cambridge History of America and the World (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
• ‘The Statecraft of Theodore Roosevelt and America’s Rise to World Power,’ in Chris Dietrich, A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020)
• ‘The Ordeal of Paris: Herbert Hoover, Woodrow Wilson and the Search for Peace,’ in Seth Cotler and Richard Ellis, Historians in Chief: How Presidents Interpreted the Past to Shape the Future, (University of Virginia Press, 2019)
• ‘Conservative Internationalism: An Overview,’ Orbis, January 2018, 62, 1, 6-21.
• ‘Sharing the Burden? The American Solution to the Armenian Question, 1918-1920,’ in Diplomatic History, 40, 4, 664-694.
• ‘The Invasion of America by an Englishman: E.D. Morel and the Anglo-American Intervention in the Congo’ in William Mulligan (ed.) The Politics and Culture of Anti-Slavery Movements in Global Perspective (Palgrave, 2013)

Selected Recent Essays

• ‘Five Best: Books on the Global March to War,’ Wall Street Journal, 7 January 2022
• ‘Destined for War?’ New Statesman, 5 November 2021.
• ‘What Recognizing the Armenian Genocide Means for U.S. Global Power,’ Washington Post, 14 November 2019.
• ‘What the Ouster of Britain’s U.S. Ambassador Says About British Power Today,’ Washington Post, 11 July 2019.
• ‘US and North Korea: What Might Peace Look Like?’ BBC News, 24 July 2018.
• ‘Back to the Future: Donald Trump and the Debate Over American Decline,’ History Today, 16 February 2017.
• ‘Donald Trump’s 1950s Self-Help Foreign Policy,’ Foreign Policy, 10 February 2017.
• ‘The Longest Hatred: Geopolitics of Anti-Semitism,’ New Statesman, 6-12 May 2016