Matthew Levinger

Matthew Levinger is a Senior Program Officer in the Education and Training Center at the United States Institute of Peace, where he teaches courses on conflict analysis and prevention for foreign policy professionals. He has more than twenty years’ experience doing research, analysis, and teaching on nationalism and violent conflict in the modern world.  Before joining the U.S. Institute of Peace, he was director of the Academy for Genocide Prevention at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum from 2005 to 2007.  At the Holocaust Museum he played a key role in launching the Genocide Prevention Task Force, co-chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen.  The Task Force’s report Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers was released in December 2008.  

Previously, Matthew was associate professor of History at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon; he has also taught at Stanford University. His research and teaching have focused on the history of nationalism and revolutionary political theory in modern Europe, as well as the history of genocide during the twentieth century. He received his B.A. from Haverford College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. From January 2003 to January 2004 he was a William C. Foster Fellow at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked on initiatives for atrocities early warning and prevention in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Publications:

• "Geographical Information Systems Technology as a Tool for Genocide Prevention: The Case of Darfur," Space and Polity, vol. 13, no. 1, April 2009, pp. 69-76.
• "Uganda's Knife Edge" New Statesman, May 24, 2008.
• Negotiating with Killers: Expert Insights on Resolving Deadly Conflicts, (audio CD) (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2007).
• The Revolutionary Era, 1789-1850, co-author (W. W. Norton, 2002).
• "Memory and Forgetting: Reinventing the Past in Postwar Germany," The Public Historian: A Journal of Public History (Fall 2002).
• "Myth and Mobilization: The Triadic Structure of Nationalist Rhetoric" (coauthor), Nations and Nationalism (Spring 2001).
• Enlightened Nationalism: The Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806-1848. (Oxford University Press, 2000).