Prof. 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. I teach undergraduates as well as graduate students and I teach both lecture classes and seminars.  My bread-and-butter seminars deal with 5 main topics: 1) great-power politics, 2) liberalism & international politics , 3) nationalism & international politics, 4) nuclear strategy, and 5) realism. I alternate each year between two lecture classes: “American Grand Strategy” and “War and the Nation-State.”