Dexter Fergie
- dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu
- Field(s): United States
- Specialization: U.S. Foreign Relations, Intellectual History, History of Science and Technology, International Relations
- Advisor(s): Daniel Immerwahr
Biography
Dexter Fergie is a doctoral candidate in US and global history, specializing in the history of international organizations, infrastructure, and US foreign relations. He is also an interviewer for the New Books Network podcast.
His dissertation, entitled “Headquartering the World: American Power and the Space of Global Governance, 1945-1980” asks how US hegemony has transformed both the international system and the United States. Focusing on the United Nations headquarters, it examines the consequences of locating the center of world government on US soil after the Second World War, showing how the location of the UN headquarters has entangled the United States and the world in ways that have both benefitted and troubled Washington.
Dexter has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Harry S. Truman Library.
Dexter has a BA in international relations and an MA in history, both from the University of British Columbia.
Publications
- "How American Culture Ate the World," New Republic (2022).
- “The Strange Career of ‘National Security’,” The Atlantic (2019).
- “Geopolitics Turned Inwards: The Princeton Military Studies Group and the National Security Imagination,” Diplomatic History 43:4 (2019).
- “The Department of Everything Else,” Los Angeles Review of Books.
Exhibits
"Ambassadors to the Public: 70 Years of Guided Tours of the UN Headquarters" (online and in UN Visitor Lobby, UN headquarters in New York, November 2022)