Dr. Walter A. McDougall is the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has become legendary among students. His many honors include the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for history. McDougall graduated from New Trier (Illinois) High School (1964) and Amherst College (1968). After military service in Vietnam McDougall received his PhD from the University of Chicago (1974). He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, before coming to Penn in 1988. He is also a Senior Fellow at Philadelphia's Foreign Policy Research Institute where he edited Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs.

An unabashed generalist, his books range from France's Rhineland Diplomacy 1914-1924 (1978), to the Pulitzer Prize-winning .the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985), Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific (1992), Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (1997), Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828 (2004), and Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 (2008), which was selected by the Athenæum of Philadelphia as best book of the year. His latest book is The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How American Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest" (2016) published by Yale University Press. A devotee of books, sports, and all kinds of music from Bach to Bob Dylan, McDougall lives with his wife in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and has two grown children.