Professor John J. Mearsheimer

John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982.

He graduated from West Point in 1970 and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He then started graduate school in political science at Cornell University in 1975. He received his Ph.D. in 1980. He spent the 1979-1980 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs from 1980 to 1982. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Professor Mearsheimer has written about security issues and international politics, has published six books, from which the most well-known are The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001) and The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018). He has also written many articles that have appeared in academic journals like International Security and popular magazines like Foreign Affairs and the London Review of Books.