David C. Engerman is a scholar of twentieth-century international history. Building on his dual training in American and Russian/Soviet history at the University of California-Berkeley (where he received his Ph.D. in 1998), he wrote two books on the place of Russia and the USSR in American intellectual and political life: Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard UP, 2003) and Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford UP, 2009). 

He has also researched and written on a variety of topics related to the history of development assistance, including a co-edited volume, Staging Growth: Modernization, Development and the Global Cold War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), and most recently a monograph, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Harvard UP, 2018).  This research was also the topic of his presidential address for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2016.  Research for The Price of Aid was supported by grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the American Philosophical Society, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Eisenhower, Johnson and Truman presidential libraries.

Engerman joined the Yale faculty in 2018 after 19 years at Brandeis University. His current research focuses on the geopolitics and the intellectual history of international economic inequality in the second half of the twentieth century.

Courses Taught

Selected Publications

Books

Volume Co-editor. Cambridge History of America in the World, vol. IV: 1945-Present. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India. Harvard University Press, 2018.

Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development.  Harvard University Press, 2003.

Co-editor. Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War.  University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.

Reprint editor. The God That Failed: Six Studies of Communism. Columbia University Press, 2001. 

Recent Articles

“Icônes de l’Amité: L’aide soviétique, l’acier indien et la Guerre froid économique,” Monde(s): Histoire, Espaces, Relations 18:2 (2020), 95-107.

“Empires, Visible and Invisible,” Modern Intellectual History 18:1 (March 2021), 288-297.

“Mission from Moscow: Soviet Advisors and the Second Indian Five-Year Plan,” Noveishaia istoriia Rossii 9:3 (2019), 685-696.