Samuel Moyn

Samuel Moyn received a doctorate in modern European history from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000 and a law degree from Harvard University in 2001. Before Yale, he was a professor at Harvard University and Columbia University. His areas of interest in legal scholarship include constitutional law, international law, human rights, the law of war, and legal thought, in both historical and current perspective. In intellectual history, he has worked on a diverse range of subjects, especially twentieth-century European moral and political theory.

His most recent book, is Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023), based on the Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought at the University of Oxford. He has written several books about  human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010) and Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021), and edited or coedited a number of others. Over the years, he has written in venues such as Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Moyn has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Berggruen Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. His books have won the Morris Forkosch Prize of the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize of the German Studies Association.