Matt Levinger
Project Director & Host

Matthew Levinger is Host of the America’s Why Podcast. Matt is a Professor of Practice of International Affairs at the George Washington University. Since 2012, he has directed the National Security Studies Program, an executive education program on national security leadership for senior officials from the U.S. government and its international partners. For nine years, he also directed the Master of International Policy and Practice Program (MIPP) at GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs. Before joining GW, he was Senior Program Officer at the United States Institute of Peace, where he developed and taught executive education programs on international conflict analysis and prevention for foreign policy professionals from the United States and overseas. From 2004 to 2007, Matt was founding director of the Academy for Genocide Prevention at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Before moving to Washington, he was associate professor of History at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon; he was also a lecturer in History at Stanford University. In 2003-2004, he was a William C. Foster Fellow at the U.S. Department of State. 

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Matt’s research and teaching have focused on conflict analysis and prevention, as well as the history of nationalism, revolutionary politics, and genocide. His handbook Conflict Analysis: Understanding Causes, Unlocking Solutions was published by the U.S. Institute of Peace Press in 2013.  He is also the author of Enlightened Nationalism: The Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806-1848 (Oxford, 2000) and coauthor of The Revolutionary Era, 1789-1850 (Norton, 2002). He received his B.A. from Haverford College and his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago.

Matt’s father was a German Jew whose family fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and settled in New York. His mother was a Southern Presbyterian who grew up in Mississippi; she was the descendant of Puritans who came to colonial New England a decade after the Mayflower. They found common ground in the Quaker faith, which emphasized the importance of recognizing the light of God in all humans and working together to build a more just and peaceful world. Matt dedicates this podcast to their memory.