Timothy Naftali, formerly a clinical professor of public service at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, clinical professor of history in NYU’s College of Arts and Science, and director of NYU’s undergraduate public policy program, joined Columbia in July 2023 as a senior research scholar and adjunct professor at SIPA. Since 2025, he has been the coordinator of SIPA’s M.A. thesis program and in the summer of 2026 Naftali began leading an Arctic Task Force for the Institute of Global Politics. Naftali, who earned a Ph.D. in history at Harvard with a work on the origins of US counterespionage and whose book Khrushchev’s Cold War with Aleksandr Fursenko, won the Royal United Services Institute’s Duke of Westminster’s medal for military literature in 2007, is a pioneer in the study of modern international and espionage history and is a well-recognized presidential and Cold War historian. After serving as the first director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs’ presidential recordings program. Naftali became the founding director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2007, where he curated a nationally recognized nonpartisan permanent exhibit on Watergate and oversaw the release of 1.3 million pages of records. Naftali is the author, co-author or editor of 8 books, including a biography of George Herbert Walker Bush and histories of US counterterrorism policy and of presidential impeachment. Naftali was an historical consultant to both the US government’s Nazi War Crimes and Imperial Japanese Government Records Interagency Working Group and to the 9/11 Commission. From 2022 until April 2025, he was a member of the State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, which provides oversight for the Foreign Relations of the United States series and the Department’s declassification of national security materials. Naftali, who is a CNN presidential historian, has appeared in several documentaries, most recently Netflix’s “Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War,” CNN’s “This Land” and the History Channel’s “World War II with Tom Hanks.” He has also consulted on CNN’s “Tricky Dick” and Netflix’s “Designated Survivor” and was executive producer for “Shadow Man: William Stephenson and the Art of Political Warfare.”
