Associate Director of the Program in American Grand Strategy
Susan Colbourn is the associate director of the Program in American Grand Strategy (AGS). In that role, she manages the day-to-day operations of the program, including spearheading its marketing, communications, and outreach, providing strategic direction, and managing the program's budget, grants, and major partnerships. Alongside the rest of the AGS team, Colbourn coordinates an array of co-curricular activities, bringing distinguished policymakers and scholars to Duke and offering distinctive, hands-on learning opportunities for students interested in US foreign policy and national security.
To that role, she also brings an academic background in contemporary international affairs and experience at a number of top centers for the study of international security. A historian of modern international relations, Colbourn specializes in transatlantic relations and European security since 1945, with an emphasis on the past, present, and future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). She is the author of Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO, published by Cornell University Press in 2022. At Duke, she teaches courses on contemporary international affairs and US foreign relations.
Prior to joining Duke, she held fellowships at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and International Security Studies at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Toronto.