Nathan Grau, a Postdoctoral Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at the Davidson Institute for Global Security, has been awarded the 2026 Oxford University Press USA Dissertation Prize in International History by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).
The prize recognizes Grau’s dissertation, “Brazzaville’s Diaspora: Colonial Development, Counterinsurgent Violence, and the Struggle for Self-Determination, 1941–1958,” completed at Harvard University under the direction of Mary Lewis. The work offers a fresh and provocative reinterpretation of how the international order was rebuilt after World War II. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources and a multi-scalar approach, Grau challenges the longstanding reading of the 1944 Brazzaville Conference as a lost opportunity for progressive reform in the French Empire. He argues that one element of the conference’s liberal vision—federated governance organized around racial divisions—survived and reshaped colonial rule worldwide, generating new conflicts in Madagascar, Indochina, and Algeria, some of which endure today. The brutality of the postwar French Empire, he contends, stemmed not from the defeat of liberal reformers but from their costly success.
A historian of global imperialism, Grau studies the politics of state formation, self-determination, and counterinsurgency in France’s twentieth-century colonial empire. He earned his doctorate in History from Harvard in 2025, and before arriving at Dartmouth he held fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and the Notre Dame International Security Center.
Grau is part of the E. John Rosenwald, Jr. ’52 TU’53 Postdoctoral Fellows program in US Foreign Policy and International Security. We congratulate Nate on this distinguished recognition.
