Susan Pedersen

Radcliffe College
Harvard University

History

Columbia University

Life[edit]

Born a Canadian citizen and raised in Japan, she received her B.A. (1982) from Radcliffe College and both her M.A. (1983) and Ph.D (1989) from Harvard University, where she was also a professor and served as the university's Dean of Undergraduate Education. In the latter position, she defended the university against charges of excessive grade inflation.


Pedersen joined the Columbia faculty in 2003. Among her works is a biography of Eleanor Rathbone. She also recently completed a book on the mandate system of the League of Nations; in 2005 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to assist with research on this project.[3]


Susan Pedersen was Bosch Fellow in Public Policy at the American Academy in Berlin, for Spring 2009. She was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2020.[4]

The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (, 2015), winner of the 2015 Cundill Prize in Historical Literature.

Oxford University Press

Susan Pedersen (eds) Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century, Routledge, 2005, ISBN 0-415-94924-6, ISBN 978-0-415-94924-8

Caroline Elkins

. Yale UP. 2004. ISBN 978-0-300-10245-1.

Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience

John Leonard Clive; Susan Pedersen; , eds. (1994). After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-07056-0.

Peter Mandler

. Cambridge UP. 1993. ISBN 978-0-521-55834-1.

Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945

"National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy-making," Vol. 63, No. 4, December 1991

The Journal of Modern History

"Gender, Welfare, and Citizenship in Britain during the Great War," Vol. 95, No. 4, October 1990

The American Historical Review

"Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England," 25 (January 1986): 84-113.

Journal of British Studies

NPR interview with Susan Pedersen on grade inflation at Harvard