Matthew Specter

Matthew Specter

Matthew Specter is an intellectual historian of modern Europe and transatlantic relations in the 19th and 20th centuries. He has been a Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley since 2017. Specter is the author of two monographs: The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought Between Germany and the United States (Stanford UP, 2022; Mandarin translation 2025) and Habermas: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge UP, 2010; Turkish and Spanish translations). He is a globally recognized authority on 20th century German political thought and the realist tradition in international relations. Since 2014, he has served as Associate Editor of the leading international journal in the theory of history, History & Theory. A native of New York City, he was educated at Harvard, Brown (BA magna cum laude) and Duke, earning the Ph.D. in History from Duke in 2006. 

He has published chapters in four books: Critical Encounters with Habermas’s Political and Legal Theory (Brill 2025); Fascism in America: Past and Present (Cambridge UP 2023), and the Handbuch der Kritische Theorie (Metzler, 2026); The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (Oxford UP 2016), He has chapters appearing in 2027 in three more: The International Thought of the Radical Right: Geopolitics and Beyond (Cambridge); The Monroe Doctrine: History, Interpretations, Legacies (Cambridge); and The Cambridge Companion to Continental Philosophy.

His articles and reviews have been published in History & Theory, Modern Intellectual History, Constellations, Central European History, the Journal of Modern History, Global Studies Quarterly, and Analyse und Kritik. He has written for public-facing outlets such as Dissent and the Los Angeles Review of Books and has been interviewed on numerous podcasts.

He is currently working on a biography of Lawrence Dennis and the history of anti-interventionism on the American right. His research has been supported by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the American Council on Germany, the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna, the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (Frankfurt am Main), the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (Vienna), the Center for Humanities at Wesleyan University, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 2011, he was honored with the Central Connecticut State University’s Board of Trustees Award for outstanding accomplishments in research.

Since 2017 he has taught in various programs at UC Berkeley: History, Political Economy, Global Studies and Legal Studies. His courses have ranged from the global history of decolonization and the Cold War, to European film and history since 1945, to the comparative history of populism and fascism in the US and Europe. Before coming to Berkeley, he was Associate Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University (2008-17), responsible for modern German and modern European intellectual history. He has also taught in the History departments at Stanford, the University of San Francisco, George Mason and Duke.

• HIST 122C - Politics and Passions in Modern Germany
• HIST 33/103 - This Is What Democracy Looks Like? Populism, Fascism and Crisis
• HIST 67/167 - Anticolonialism and Decolonization in the 20th Century
• HIST 59 - War and Peace in Modern International Thought