David Milne

About David Milne

David Milne was born in Edinburgh in 1976. He graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science with a BA in History in 1998 and an MSc in the History of International Relations in 2000. He moved to the University of Cambridge in 2001, where he was awarded his Ph.D. in 2005.

His first book, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War, was published by Hill and Wang in 2008. His second book, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy was published in 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The Booker Prize-longlisted novelist Christos Tsiolkas selected Worldmaking as one of his best reads of 2021 for The Sydney Morning Herald. Tsiolkas described the book as "a joyful surprise. Milne has a born writer’s intuition for narrative and character."

Milne is also senior editor of the two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) and co-editor (with Christopher McKnight Nichols) of Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).

Beyond these books, David has published in numerous academic journals, including The Journal of Military History, Diplomatic History, the Review of International Studies, International Affairs, the Historical Journal, and the International Journal. His writing has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, Salon, and the New Statesman.

David's current book-in-progress is a biography of the trailblazing Chicago Tribune journalist, Sigrid Schultz. The British journalist Quentin Reynolds believed Schultz's Berlin reporting made her "Hitler’s greatest enemy."; Hermann Göring denounced Schultz as "that dragon lady from Chicago." Yet Schultz has largely vanished from historical view. An ally to Gustav Stresemann, interviewer of Hitler, and prescient analyst of Nazism, Schultz overcame significant obstacles - as a woman in a male-dominated milieu; as a foreign journalist working a totalitarian state; and as an interventionist at an isolationist newspaper - throughout a remarkable career. "Witness to Catastrophe: A Life of Sigrid Schultz" is under contract with Oxford University Press.

David Milne was an associate tutor at the LSE from 2002 to 2003, a lecturer in American Foreign Relations at the University of Nottingham from 2004 to 2008, and is currently Professor in Modern History at the University of East Anglia. He lives in Norwich with his wife, Emma Griffin, and their two children, Benedict and Anna