About Speaker

Dr. Michael Kimmage, the founding director of the independent Kennan Institute, was appointed Director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center in January, 2025. He is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America and has had think-tank appointments at the German Marshall Fund and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He is the author of The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Harvard University Press, 2009); The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (Basic Books, 2020); and Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability (Oxford University Press, 2024), among other books.

He has been a visiting professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and at Vilnius University in Lithuania.

He holds a B.A. from Oberlin College, a B.A. from University of Oxford (University College), and an M.A and Ph.D. from Harvard University.