Expertise: History of U.S. foreign relations, the Cold War, decolonization, the Vietnam War

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Senior Fellow

Mark Atwood Lawrence is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and, from 2006 to 2008, Cassius Marcellus Clay Fellow in the History Department at Yale University. At Yale, he is writing two books — a brief history of the Vietnam War and a study of U.S. policymaking toward the third world in the 1960s.

Lawrence earned his BA in history from Stanford University in 1988 and his MA, also from Stanford, in 1989. In 1992, he returned to graduate school as a doctoral student at Yale, where he earned his PhD in history in 1998. Lawrence held a John M. Olin postdoctoral fellowship in international security studies in 1998-1999 and taught as a lecturer in the Yale Department of History in 1998-1999 and 1999-2000.

He was appointed Assistant Professor of history at UT-Austin in 2000. There, he teaches a range of courses in U.S. history, especially the history of U.S. foreign relations, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. In 2005, he was awarded the President’s Associates’ Award for Teaching Excellence by UT-Austin.

Lawrence is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), which won two prizes from the American Historical Association in 2007 — the George Beer Prize for European international history and the Paul Birdsall Prize for strategic and military history. He has also written several chapters, articles, and reviews on the Vietnam War and other topics in U.S. diplomatic history. He is co-editor (with Fredrik Logevall of Cornell University) of The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis, a volume of essays about the French war in Indochina (Harvard University Press, 2007).

Selected Research:

• The Vietnam War: A Concise International History, Oxford University Press, 2008
• The First Vietnam War Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (edited by with Fred Logevall), Harvard University Press, 2007

Selected Commentary:

• "Vietnam Revisited," Commentary Magazine, Mar 2008