Ted Widmer

From 2001 to 2006, he was the inaugural director of the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College, where he created programs designed to enliven the teaching of American history and politics to diverse groups, ranging from Muslim college students in historically anti-American regions of the world to elementary students in underfinanced public school districts of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He designed the prototype for the American Studies Institute, a collaborative project with the State Department that brings young Muslims to the United States for summer programs, and created the George Washington Book Prize, which awards $50,000 to the author of the best book on the founding era (co-sponsored by Mount Vernon and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History).

Dr. Widmer is the author of Martin Van Buren (2005), Campaigns: A Century of Presidential Races (with Alan Brinkley, 2001), and Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (1999), and has edited the two volumes of American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton published by the Library of America (2006). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The New York Observer, and The American Scholar.

Between 1997 and 2001, he was a foreign policy speechwriter and senior adviser to President Clinton. Previously, he taught at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D., A.M. and A.B degrees.

Dr. Widmer's research interests include U.S. presidential history, the Colonial period, and 19th- and 20th-century U.S. political history. He is also conducting research on how U.S. history shapes electoral politics and the history of anti-Americanism around the world. As a Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program, he will be examining U.S. policy through the contours of American historical experience to complement the extensive New America Foundation scholarship on the roots of America's contemporary foreign policy.