Stephen Wertheim
Email: saw2156@columbia.edu
Field: International/Global
Advisor: Matthew Connelly
Year:
2008
Stephen Wertheim is a doctoral candidate in international history at Columbia University. He studies international politics, particularly the history of international society — and the role of the United States therein — in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special attention to ideas and ideology. Among his thematic interests are U.S. foreign relations, trans-Atlantic internationalist ideas and movements, international law, international political thought, humanitarianism and human rights, global north-south relations, and causation in historical analysis.
Stephen received an MPhil from Columbia University (2011) and a BA summa cum laude from Harvard University (2007), where he served as managing editor of the Harvard International Review. A Jacob K. Javits Fellowship supports his doctoral studies.
Stephen is rapporteur of the Columbia University Seminar on Twentieth-Century Politics and Society and has helped to organize Columbia's Center for International History.
Some of his writings may be viewed on his website. These include:
- The League of Nations: A Retreat from International Law? Journal of Global History Vol. 7 No. 2 (July 2012): 210-232.
- "The League That Wasn't: American Designs for a Legalist-Sanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914-1920," Diplomatic History Vol. 35, No. 5 (November 2011): 797-836. [Awarded the 2012 Fishel-Calhoun Prize by the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era]
- "A Solution from Hell: The United States and the Rise of Humanitarian Interventionism, 1991-2003," Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 12, No. 3-4 (September-December 2010): 149-172.
- "Reluctant Liberator: Theodore Roosevelt's Philosophy of Self-Government and Preparation for Philippine Independence," Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3 (September 2009): 494-518.
In his spare time, Stephen thinks up comedy ideas, talks about them, and fails to carry them out.