Professor Michael Burleigh (born 3 April 1955) is a British historian, author, and commentator. He has written extensively on international relations, populism, terrorism, and modern European history. He was the first Engelsberg Chair of History and International Relations at the London School of Economics IDEAS centre (2019âÂÂ2020) and remains a Senior Fellow there, working on a project about world orders.
Burleigh was educated at University of London, where at UCL he was awarded a First Class Honours in History in 1977 and Bedford College, London, where he received a PhD in history in 1982. He has held academic posts at New College, Oxford, the London School of Economics, and Cardiff University, where he was Distinguished Research Professor in Modern History. He has also taught in the United States at Washington and Lee University in Virginia and as Kratter Visiting Professor at Stanford University. At LSE IDEAS, Burleigh has contributed to research on foreign policy and international security. He was appointed the inaugural Engelsberg Chair of History and International Relations in 2019, an annual visiting professorship which includes public lectures for the schoolâÂÂs foreign policy think tank.
Burleigh is the author of a number of books translated into twentyàlanguages. His The Third Reich: A New Historyà(2000) won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2001. Small Wars, Far Away Places: The Genesis of the Modern World 1945âÂÂ65à(2013) was longlisted for the same prize in 2014. His later works include The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: A History of Nowà(2017), which examined the stability of the post-Second World War liberal order, Populism: Before and After the Pandemicà(2021), and Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murderà(2021).
Burleigh has written widely on contemporary politics and populism. In a 2021 Project Syndicate article, âÂÂA Dangerous New Variant of Populism,â he argued that opposition to climate policies and resistance to COVID-19 vaccination could merge into new forms of populist politics with significant implications for European and American democracies.
Burleigh has presented and contributed to television documentaries, including Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third ReichÃÂ (1991), which won a British Film Institute Award for Archival Achievement, and Heil Herbie: The Story of the Volkswagen BeetleÃÂ (1993), which won a New York Film and Television Festival Bronze Medal and presented Dark Enlightenment on More4.
He has written regularly for British newspapers including The Times, The i Paper,ÃÂ The Daily Telegraph, The London Standard, The Daily Mail, and The Mail on Sunday. He was also a contributor to Standpoint magazine until its closure in 2021 and then Perspective magazine until its closure in 2024. He also had a foreign policy column on UnHerd.
Burleigh is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and served on the Academic Advisory Board of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich until 2018. He was the founding editor of the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religionsàand has served on the editorial boards of Totalitarismus und Demokratieàand Ethnic and Racial Studies. He is a Contributing Editor at Literary Review. àHe served on the governmentâÂÂs Advisory Committee for the Centenary Commemoration of World War One from 2012 to 2018. In 2012 he founded Sea Change Partners, a geopolitical risk consultancy.ÃÂ