Timothy Naftali
Senior Research Scholar, Institute of Global Politics at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA)
Timothy Naftali joined Columbia in July 2023 as a Senior Research Scholar at SIPA. Naftali, whose book Khrushchev’s Cold War with Aleksandr Fursenko, won the Royal United Services Institute’s Duke of Westminster’s medal for military literature in 2007, is a pioneer in the study of modern international and espionage history and is a well-recognized presidential historian. After serving as the first director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs’ presidential recordings program. Naftali became the founding director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2007, where he curated a nationally recognized nonpartisan permanent exhibit on Watergate and oversaw the release of 1.3 million pages of records. Naftali is the author, co-author or editor of 8 books, including a biography of George Herbert Walker Bush and histories of US counterterrorism policy and of presidential impeachment.