Simon Miles Selected by University as Bass Chair

Sanford faculty member Simon Miles has been named by Duke University as a Bass Chair in recognition of his excellence in undergraduate teaching and research.

Miles will be the Kevin D. Gorter Associate Professor of Public Policy, effective July 1 for a five-year term. He will become a lifetime member of the Bass Society of Fellows. Bass Chair recipients, including Miles, were honored at a Duke University reception for Bass Chairs on April 15. 

The Bass program, established through a gift to Duke in 1996 from Anne T. and Richard M. Bass, honors faculty members who have achieved “true excellence in both research and teaching, and are good university citizens.” The Bass Society provides an opportunity for some of Duke's most celebrated educators to pool their experiences and resources and collaborate on innovative, interdisciplinary research and teaching initiatives.  

“We are delighted that Simon Miles has been named the next Kevin D. Gorter chair,” said Anna Gassman-Pines, Sanford’s Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs. “As an excellent teacher, mentor, scholar and colleague, Simon is truly worthy of this honor.” 

A historian of strategy and diplomacy, Miles’s research and teaching leverage the lessons of the past to better understand and answer today’s national security challenges. Miles joined the faculty of the Sanford School of Public Policy in 2017.  He teaches courses on grand strategy, statecraft, and military and diplomatic history.  He is an expert on Russia and the Soviet Union whose research focuses primarily on Cold War diplomatic and military history and its relevance to our world today. 

“Being awarded a Bass Chair is a real honor here at Duke and I’m grateful to everyone behind this recognition," said Prof. Miles. “The mission behind the Bass Chairs is symbiosis between, and excellence in, both research and teaching, and that has always been my mantra as a faculty member in the Sanford School.” 

Miles is the incoming director of graduate studies for the Sanford School’s Master of National Security Policy, a hybrid, mid-career program for leaders in the military, government, and private sectors. He also has secondary appointments in the Departments of History and Slavic and Eurasian Studies.

His first book, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War, published in 2020 by Cornell University Press, used international archives — from both sides of the Iron Curtain — to explain how and why the US-Soviet rivalry underwent such unexpected and profound change in the 1980s that it has since become a textbook case of adversaries setting aside disagreements and cooperating. He is currently working on his second book, On Guard for Peace and Socialism: The Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991. Drawing on archival materials from all of the Pact’s eight former members, it examines the ways in which each conceived of and provided for their own security in the nuclear age, individually and as an alliance.

Faculty member Manoj Mohanan is the current Creed C. Black Professor of Public Policy. Previous Kevin D. Gorter professors include Deondra Rose, Kristin Goss, Judith Kelley and Robert Korstad. Other Sanford faculty who held Bass Chairs and are Bass Fellows include Nicholas Carnes, the Creed C. Black Professor of Public Policy, 2018–2023, and Gunther Peck, the Fred W. Shaffer Associate Professor of History, 2006–2011. Read more in the Duke announcement.