Thomas Borstelmann

Thomas (“Tim”) Borstelmann has been the Elwood N. and Katherine Thompson Distinguished Professor of Modern World History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln since 2003. He spent the previous twelve years as a member of the History Department at Cornell University. Borstelmann holds a B.A. from Stanford University (1980) and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University (1986, 1990). His research focuses on the intersection of United States domestic history and international history. He is the author of Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle (Oxford, 1993), The Cold War and the Color Line (Harvard, 2001), and The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, 2012), and he has coauthored Created Equal (Pearson, 5th edition, 2016). His most recent book, Just Like Us: The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners (Columbia, 2020) is featured in his Rorotoko interview. In 2015, Borstelmann served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and won the Annis Chaikin Sorensen Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.