John J. Mearsheimer

John J. Mearsheimer the author of the recently published book Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He then started graduate school in political science at Cornell University in 1975. He received his Ph.D. in 1980. He spent the 1979-1980 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs from 1980 to 1982. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Mearsheimer has written extensively about security issues and international politics more generally. His other published books are Conventional Deterrence (1983), which won the Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., Book Award; Liddell Hart and the Weight of History(1988); The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), which won the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize; and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (with Stephen M. Walt, 2007), which made The New York Times best-seller list and has been translated into 19 languages. He has also written many articles that have appeared in academic journals like International Security, and popular magazines like the London Review of Books. He has written a number of op-ed pieces for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times dealing with topics like Bosnia, nuclear proliferation, American policy toward India, the failure of Arab-Israeli peace efforts, and the folly of invading Iraq. Mearsheimer has won a number of teaching awards, including the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching when he was a graduate student at Cornell in 1977 and the Quantrell Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Chicago in 1985. In addition, he was selected as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the 1993-1994 academic year. In that capacity, he gave a series of talks at eight colleges and universities. In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.