About ME

I’m Susie Colbourn, a historian of international relations and the global order since 1945. Mostly, my research, writing, and commentary focuses on European security and the past, present, and future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – plus a healthy splash of Canadian content.

At Duke, I am the associate director of the Program in American Grand Strategy and an associate research professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy. With the rest of the team at AGS, I bring policymakers, practitioners, and experts to Duke and develop distinctive learning opportunities for students interested in US foreign policy and national security. I also teach classes on the history of US foreign relations.

I am the author of Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO, which came out in the fall of 2022, and the editor, along with Timothy Andrews Sayle, of The Nuclear North: Histories of Canada in the Atomic Age.

Right now, I am chipping away at a handful of book projects, including a history of NATO from its founding to the present and a book about the long struggle to overcome the Cold War division of Europe from the 1940s through the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

A term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, I also serve as an associate editor of the Texas National Security Review. I am an affiliate of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies and the America in the World Consortium, as well as a senior fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto.

Prior to coming to Duke, I held fellowships at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and International Security Studies at Yale University.

I received my Ph.D. in History from the University of Toronto with a concentration in modern international relations. I also hold an MA from the London School of Economics and an Hon. BA from Trinity College in the University of Toronto, where I had the honour of being elected Head of College.

Originally Canadian, I now call Durham, North Carolina home. True to national stereotypes, I love to catch a hockey match when and where I can.