Mattias Hessérus

About

Mattias Hessérus is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and one of the team leads for the transatlantic perspectives team within Hoover’s Economic and Security Commons initiative. He is also director of the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy, a four-university transatlantic consortium with partners at Johns Hopkins SAIS, the University of Cambridge, King’s College London, and the Stockholm School of Economics, in collaboration with Sweden’s Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit. The institute is dedicated to training the next generation of historically minded scholars and practitioners in statecraft, diplomacy, and strategy.

Hessérus has played a leading role in the applied history movement. Through his work for the foundation, Hessérus led the building of the Ax:son Johnson Institute and, with Iain Martin, led the creation and launch of the foundation-initiated online magazine Engelsberg Ideas. He served as project leader of the Engelsberg Seminar from 2013 to 2024. Founded in 1999, the seminar has had an applied history approach from its inception.

Hessérus is the coauthor of How Media Ownership Matters (Oxford University Press, 2025, with Rodney Benson, Timothy Neff, and Julie Sedel), which was shortlisted for the International Journal of Press/Politics Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award and was named a finalist for the Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award. He is also the author of Rätten till privatlivet (The Right to Privacy, Carlssons Bokförlag, 2017), a history of the press and privacy in Sweden, and co-editor of several anthologies, including Classics of Applied History (Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2023). He is working on an intellectual biography of political scientist Harold D. Lasswell. He holds a PhD from Uppsala University.