Andrew Preston is Professor of American History at Cambridge University and a fellow at Clare College.

He specializes in the history of American foreign relations, primarily since 1898, and he’s the author or editor of nine books. Among the most recent ones are Rethinking American Grand Strategy, edited together with Elizabeth Borgwardt and Christopher McKnight Nichols (OUP, 2021), and American Foreign Relations: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2019). In 2013, he also won the Charles Taylor Prize with the book Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (Knopf).

He is currently writing a book on the idea of national security in American history as well as co-editing (with Lien-Hang Nguyen) Vol. 2 of the forthcoming three-volume Cambridge History of the Vietnam War.

In his talk, titled From Planning to Strategy: New Deal Liberalism and the Invention of National Security, he will discuss his current research project. Historians are increasingly in agreement that American "national security" is not a timeless concept or a neutral descriptor of U.S. foreign and military policies. It has a political, conceptual, and ideological history of its own that only recently has started to come to light. But where did it come from? Did it develop as a reaction to external crises, or was there something more to it? Drawing directly from a draft chapter from his forthcoming book The Invention of National Security, Preston will explain how the concept was a product of the late 1930s-early 1940s, but just as much for domestic reasons, rooted in political economy and social security, rather than as a reaction to the growing world crisis.

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