Man in blue shirt with glasses in front of a stone building
Mark Philip Bradley Faculty Director, Pozen Family Center for Human Rights
Senior Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, the College
Editor, American Historical Review Office: Social Science Research Building, room 502
Mailbox 19
 Office hours: Spring Quarter 2024 By appointment. Phone: (773) 702-3558 Email Interests:

Twentieth-century US international history; global history of human-rights politics; postcolonial Southeast Asia
Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of International History and the College

Harvard University, PhD '95

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Twentieth-century US international history; global history of human-rights politics; postcolonial Southeast Asia

BIOGRAPHY

Mark Philip Bradley is the author of The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (2016), Vietnam at War (2009), and Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam (2000), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. He is the coeditor of Making the Forever War (2021), Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (2015), Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (2008), and Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights (2001). Bradley's work has appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, the Journal of World History, Diplomatic History, and Dissent. His current project is an intellectual and cultural history of the global South under contract with Yale University Press.

A recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Fulbright-Hays, Bradley was appointed editor of the American Historical Review in 2021.  He has served as the elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, general editor for the four volume Cambridge History of America and the World and coeditor of the Cornell University Press book series, The United States in the World.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Books
Edited Volumes

  • The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn, coeditor with Brooke L. Blower. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015.

  • Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Transnational and International Perspectives, coeditor with Marilyn B. Young. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

  • Truth Claims: Representations and Human Rights, coeditor with Patrice Petro. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Selected Essays and Articles

  • “Making Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s The Spector of the Ancestors Becoming,” American Historical Review 127.3 (September 2022): 1312-18. 

  • “What is America and the World?”, Cambridge History of America and the World, volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021): 1-7. 

  • “The Anecdote,” co-written with Lee Weng-Choy, Portable Gray 4.2 (Fall 2021): 310-18.

  • "Understanding the Rise of the Global South in Pandemic Times." Diplomatic History 45, no. 3 (2021): 460-67.

  • "Making Peace as a Project of Moral Reconstruction." In The Cambridge History of the Second World War, vol. 3, edited by Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze, 528–551. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

  • Cowritten with Viet Thanh Nguyen. "Vietnam: American and Vietnamese Public Diplomacy, 1945–2010." In Adversarial States, US Foreign Policy, and Public Diplomacy, edited by Geoffrey Wiseman, 110–139. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

  • “American Vernaculars: The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination (Presidential Address),” Diplomatic History 38, no. 1 (Jan. 2014): 1–21.

  • “The Charlie Maier Scare: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations, 1959–1980.” In America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941, 2nd ed., edited by Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan, 9–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

  • “Internationalism.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History, edited by Timothy J. Lynch, 517–23. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

  • “The United States and the Global Human Rights Politics in the 1940s.” In Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations, edited by Helle Porsdam, 118–35. London: Edward Elgar, 2012.

  • “Writing Human Rights History.” Il Mestiere di storico 3, no. 2 (2011): 13–30.

  • “Approaching the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” In The Human Rights Revolution: An International History, edited by Akira Iriye, Petra Goode, and William Hitchcock, 327–43. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

  • “Setting the Stage: Vietnamese Revolutionary Nationalism and the First Vietnam War.” In The Columbia History of the Vietnam Wars, edited by David Anderson, 93–119. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

  • "Decolonization, Revolutionary Nationalism, and the Cold War, 1919-1962." In The Cambridge History of the War, vol. 1, edited by Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

  • "The Ambiguities of Sovereignty: The United States and the Global Rights Cases of the 1940s." In Art of the State: Sovereignty Past and Present, edited by Douglas Howland and Luise White. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

  • "Introduction." In Human Rights and Revolution, edited by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt, and Greg Grandin. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.

  • "Interchange: Legacies of the Vietnam Wars." Journal of American History 43, no. 2 (Sept. 2006): 452–91.

  • "Making Sense of the French War: Postcolonial Modernity and Vietnam, 1946-1954." In Indochina in the Balance: New Perspectives on the First Vietnam War, edited by Mark Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, 16–40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

  • "The Imperial and the Postcolonial." In Palgrave Advances in International History, edited by P. Finney, 247–266. London and New York: Palgrave/Macmillan Press, 2005.

  • "Becoming Van Minh: Civilizational Discourse and Rights Talk in Colonial Vietnam." Journal of World History 15, no. 1 (Mar. 2004): 65–83.

  • "Franklin Roosevelt, Trusteeship and US Exceptionalism: Reconsidering American Visions of Postcolonial Vietnam." In The Transformation of Southeast Asia: International Perspectives on Decolonization, edited by Marc Frey, Ronald W. Preussen, and Tan Tai Yong, 197–212. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2003; and in A Companion to the Vietnam War, edited by Marilyn B.Young and Robert Buzzanco, 130–145. New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.

  • "Contests of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting War in the Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema." In The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, edited by Hue-Tam Ho Tai, 196–226. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

  • "Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Culture, Diplomacy, and the Origins of the Cold War in Vietnam." In Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966, edited by Christian G. Appy, 11–34. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.

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