Christian Ostermann

About

Christian F. Ostermann is the Peter J. and Frances Duignan Distinguished Visiting Fellow. He has served as the director of the History and Public Policy Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which has been a global leader in making public the primary source record of 20th and 21st centuries international relations from repositories around the world; training interdisciplinary groups of next-generation scholar-practitioners in archival, qualitative, and collaborative research methods; and applying new sources and history to inform public policy debates and decisions. He directs the National Cold War Center in Blytheville, AR, the future site of the National Museum of the Cold War. A specialist in Cold War archives, contemporary German history, and intelligence studies, Ostermann led the Cold War International History Project, codirected the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project and founded the North Korea International Documentation Project. He is the author of Between Containment and Rollback: The United States and the Cold War in Germany (Stanford University Press, 2021), which won the Organization of American Historians 2021 Richard W. Leopold Prize and the 2022 Harry S. Truman Book Award. He is currently working on a biography of former East German spymaster Markus Wolf. He received his PhD from the University of Cologne, Germany.