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Susan Pedersen is Gouverneur Morris Professor of British History at Columbia University, where she teaches British, European and international history after 1900. She received her B.A. and PhD from Harvard University, where she was Professor of History and served for a time as Dean for Undergraduate Education. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the Radcliffe Institute and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, among others, and has taught as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Cambridge.
Pedersen’s first book, Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State (1993) examined the way European welfare states came to account for dependence; her second book (2004) recovered the life of the visionary social theorist and social reformer Eleanor Rathbone. Her study of the mandates system of the League of Nations, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (2015) was awarded the 2015 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature. Burn This Letter: Love and Trouble in a Marriage of Four (2026), about the tangled political and intimate lives of two women who married into the Balfour family, is just out from John Murray. Her Ford Lectures at Oxford University, Internationalism and Empire: British Dilemmas, 1919-39, are available online at: https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-m672-1p02.
She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.
A full list of Susan's publications can be found here.
Expertise:
Interwar British politics and society; The League of Nations; Geopolitics and imperial contestation between the world wars; British women's history and women's suffrage; Biography