Gregg Herken


Gregg Herken is an American historian and museum curator who is Professor Emeritus of modern American diplomatic History at the University of California, Santa Cruz & Merced, whose scholarship mostly concerns the history of the development of atomic energy and the Cold War.

Biography

In 1969, Herken received a B.A. from University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1974, he received a Ph.D. in modern American diplomatic history from Princeton University.
Herken held teaching positions at California State University, San Luis Obispo, Oberlin College, Yale University, and California Institute of Technology, and was a Fulbright-Hays senior research scholar at Lund University. During 1988–2003 he was a senior historian and curator of military space, as well as chairman of the Department of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1994–95, he served on the U.S. government's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Since 2005, Herken has been a Senior Fellow at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.

Works

In 2003, Herken's book Brotherhood of the Bomb, for which he received a MacArthur Grant to write, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history.