Greg Grandin is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University.

He is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. The End of the Myth won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the prize in History. Other books include Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic, first published in 2005 and significantly revised and expanded in 2021, and Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman.

He is also the author of The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. Released in early 2014, The Empire of Necessity narrates the history of a slave-ship revolt that inspired Herman Melville’s other masterpiece, a short story titled “Benito Cereno.” Toni Morrison called this book “scholarship at its best,” a “deft penetration into the marrow of the slave industry… brilliant.” Maureen Corrigan on NPR’s Fresh Air named The Empire of Necessity as the best book of 2014.

Grandin’s Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and picked by the New York Times, New Yorker, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and NPR for their “best of” lists, and Amazon.com named it the best history book of 2009.

Timothy Rutten of the The Los Angeles Times writes of Fordlandia: “Greg Grandin has taken what heretofore seemed . . .  a marginal event. . . and turned it into a fascinating historical narrative that illuminates the auto industry’s contemporary crisis, the problems of globalization and the contradictions of contemporary consumerism. For all of that, this is not, however, history freighted with political pedantry. Grandin is one of blessedly expanding group of gifted American historians who assume that whatever moral the story of the past may yield, it must be a story well told. . . Fordlandia is precisely that—a genuinely readable history recounted with a novelist’s sense of pace and an eye for character. It’s a significant contribution to our understanding of ourselves and engrossingly enjoyable.” The American Scholar says that  “Grandin takes full command of a complicated narrative with numerous threads, and the story spills out in precisely the right tone—about midway between Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh.”

Grandin is also the author of The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America During the Cold War and The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation, which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Award for the best book published on Latin America in any discipline. With Gil Joseph, Grandin co-edited A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War.

A former consultant to the United Nations truth commission on Guatemala, Grandin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written for various journals, including The Nation, The Guardian, The New York Times, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, Jacobin, The Boston Review, and The Intercept. For The Nation, he has written obituaries for Gabriel García Márquez, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Cormac McCarthy, Henry Kissinger, and George H.W. Bush. He has been a frequent guest on Democracy Now! and is very fond of Amy’s dog, Zazu.