Event Details

End: February 6, 2023
Contact: rwheatley@historians.org

This event is part of the Washington History Seminar series. It is cosponsored by the AHA and the Woodrow Wilson Center and features author Frank Costiglio and commentators Beverly Gage and Barbara Keyes. Register here. 

The conventional, reductive view depicts George F. Kennan as a grand strategist with some peripheral oddities. By contrast, Kennan A Life between Worlds illuminates a figure wrenched to his core. With a distinctly masculinist perspective and with a belief in Freudian theory as settled science, Kennan believed he had to somehow satisfy both “Eros” and “Civilization.” He had to negotiate between the vitality, art, and creativity supposedly nurtured by sexual freedom, and the discipline, obligation, and tedium mandated by bourgeois order. Another struggle pitted his hatred of Soviet repression against his love for the Russian people and his feeling, at times, more Russian than American. A sui generis thinker, Kennan was a pioneering environmentalist and a critic of industrial production who also had unparalleled insight into the problems of U.S. foreign policy both during and after the Cold War.

Frank Costigliola received a BA from Hamilton College in 1968 and a PhD from Cornell in 1973. The author or editor of seven books, including The Kennan Diaries (Norton, 2014), Costigliola has received fellowships from the NEH, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Norwegian Nobel Institute. He is currently Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut. Favorite books include Gregg Herken, The Georgetown Set (2014) and Beverly Gage, J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (2022). Costigliola raises grass-fed Devon cattle on a 200-acre farm in Storrs, CT.

Beverly Gage is professor of U.S. history at Yale University. She is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror. She writes regularly for publications such as the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker.

Barbara Keys is Professor of U.S. and International History in the Department of History at Durham University. She began her teaching career in 2003 after receiving her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University, where she studied under Akira Iriye and Ernest May. In 2019 she served as the President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.