Michael Kimmage is the director of the Kennan Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC. He holds undergraduate degrees in history from Oberlin College and Oxford University, and a master’s degree and PhD in History from Harvard. His most recent book is Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability (2024 in hard copy; 2026 in paperback). He is also the author of Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in U.S. Foreign Policy (2020), In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (2012), Journey through America (translation of a German-language travelogue, 2012), and The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009). His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, among many other publications.
Kimmage has been a visiting professor at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, and Vilnius University and a visiting Instructor at Free University Berlin. From 2014-17, he was a member of the Office of Policy Planning in the US Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. Kimmage is a recipient of a British Marshall Fellowship, Javits and Whiting Fellowships at Harvard, and has received support from the German Marshall Fund and Fulbright foundation, among others. He is fluent in Russian and German.
