Hugh Eakin

Class of Spring 2026

Editor at Large

Foreign Affairs

Genocide by Other Means: Cultural Destruction and Why it Matters

At the Academy, Eakin is working on his second book, “Genocide by Other Means: Cultural Destruction and Why It Matters.” The book will trace the connection between cultural and human violence in twentieth and twenty-first century conflicts. Eakin is particularly interested in the legacy of the German Kunstschutz in the two world wars, the uses of cultural violence by European powers in the twentieth century, and strategies of cultural destruction in more recent conflicts, ranging from the Iraq and Syrian civil wars to Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine. By studying individual actions to prevent such violence, Eakin will assess the extent to which this kind of warfare might be pre-empted, and how cultural reconciliations can help build and preserve peace in highly contested places.

Hugh Eakin is Editor at Large at Foreign Affairs magazine, where he commissions and edits essays and analysis on geopolitics, economics, law, and international politics, and has helped shape the magazine’s coverage of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, among other subjects. He holds a double BA from Harvard University in History and Literature, and Romance Languages, and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge University. Previously, he served as a contributing writer and senior editor at the New York Review of Books and founded NYR Daily, the Review’s online magazine. Eakin has reported from numerous countries in Europe and the Middle East and has written frequently on art and cultural heritage. He is the author of Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America (Crown, 2022), which describes the decades-long struggle of the modern art patron John Quinn and the museum visionary Alfred Barr, Jr., to transform twentieth-century American taste, and the geopolitical events leading into World War II that finally brought their dream to reality. Eakin’s essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, among others. His work has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, Getty Research Institute, and Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Humboldt University in 2002-03.