Biography

Andrew Gawthorpe is a specialist in the politics and foreign policy of the United States at Leiden University.  From 2023 – 27 he will be the principal investigator on “American foreign policy and liberalism”, a research project funded by a nearly €1m grant from the Dutch Research Council. Andrew is one of the most frequently quoted experts on U.S. politics and foreign policy in Europe. He has provided expert commentary to outlets such as BBC News, CNBC, Time Magazine and The Los Angeles Times, and has written for outlets including The Guardian, The Boston Globe, Foreign Affairs, World Politics Review, and many more.

Andrew’s academic research is focused on U.S. politics and foreign policy since 1900. He publishes across the fields of history, international relations, and American Politics. As well as publishing frequently on the foreign policy and politics of the Trump era, he is also working on a longer project about the role that illiberalism has played in U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is also currently working on a U.S. politics textbook which foregrounds questions of identity and democratic backsliding, which will be published by Sage and CQ Press in 2027. He also writes a regular U.S. politics newsletter, America Explained.

Andrew is also currently a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.

Andrew received his graduate training at the University of Cambridge and King’s College London before receiving his PhD from the latter institution in 2015.  He was then a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School.  Andrew also previously served as a Teaching Fellow at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, the UK military’s premier institution of higher education, and as a British civil servant in the Cabinet Office.