John Mueller

John Mueller is Ralph D. Mershon Senior Research Scientist and Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies Emeritus at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, and adjunct professor of political science at The Ohio State University. He is also a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. A leading expert on terrorism and particularly on the reactions (or over-reactions) it often inspires, he is the co-author (with Mark G. Stewart) of Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism, published by Oxford University Press in 2016. Their Terror, Security and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security was published in 2011 by Oxford. Other books from Mueller include Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats and Why We Believe Them (Free Press, 2006) and Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda(Oxford, 2010). He is also the editor of Terrorism Since 9/11: The American Cases (Mershon Center, Ohio State, 2015) and (with Christopher A. Preble) A Dangerous World? Threat Perception and U.S. National Security (Cato, 2014). His research and publications are on public opinion, foreign and security policy, economic history, democratic theory, as well as dance history and the choreography of Fred Astaire. His current projects include ethnic war, Hitler's role in history, public opinion during and after the Cold War, and a musical on the World War homefront. Mueller has been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has also received several teaching prizes, and in 2009 received the International Studies Association's Susan Strange Award that "recognizes a person whose singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency in the international studies community." In 2010, he received Ohio State University's Distinguished Scholar Award. He was also selected for the Playboy Honor Roll of 20 Professors Who Are Reinventing the Classroom in October 2010.