Nate Grau is a Postdoctoral Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at Dartmouth College’s Dickey Center for International Understanding. He is a historian of global imperialism, specializing on the politics of state formation, self-determination, and counterinsurgency within France’s twentieth century colonial empire. Before coming to Dartmouth, he was an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, as well as an Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow in Grand Strategy at Notre Dame’s International Security Center. His writing has appeared Agricultural History, The Journal of Military History, and The Small Wars Journal, with a peer reviewed journal article forthcoming in French Historical Studies. He received his doctorate in History from Harvard University in 2025.
Nate is currently working on a book examining recurrent patterns of civil war and mass violence during France’s decolonization conflicts in Madagascar, Indochina, and Algeria. Based on his dissertation and drawing on research from archives in five countries, the project illuminates an alternative vision of sovereignty and self-determination – fractured along racial, ethnic, or so-called “civilizational” lines – that advocates of European colonialism wove into the very foundations of the postwar international system after 1945. He argues that French efforts to build this alternative to “national” sovereignty radicalized the violence of decolonization and helped create inter-communal rifts across the Global South that endure to the present.
While at Dartmouth, Nate plans to work on his book and pursue additional archival research in Vietnam, France, and Algeria.
