Heather Penatzer

Heather Penatzer is a nonresident fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a postdoctoral fellow at Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her research examines international order and grand strategy, with particular focus on the history of ideas in American foreign policy.

Her current work at Carnegie examines the origins and evolution of America’s activist approach to grand strategy. Focusing on early Cold War strategists such as James Burnham, she traces how the intellectual foundations of the “rollback” or “liberationist” approach to the world during the Cold War persisted long after the conflict itself, inflecting subsequent debates over the purposes and exercise of American power with a distinctly transformational imperative.

In other work, Penatzer is completing a book project on internationalized territories, or cases in which multiple foreign powers have jointly governed contested territories. Drawing on cases from the nineteenth century to the present, the project explores why states sometimes turn to international governance when conventional territorial settlements prove difficult and what these arrangements reveal about sovereignty, great-power cooperation, and the management of geopolitical competition.

Penatzer received her Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University and also holds an M.A. in international relations from the University of Chicago, as well as a B.A. in political science from Sam Houston State University.  She has taught courses on international relations theory and foreign policy at Princeton, as well as at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Administration.  Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, UnHerd, and Compact.