Robert D. Kaplan
Distinguished Senior Lecturer
Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty-three books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including Waste Land, The Loom of Time, The Tragic Mind, Adriatic, The Revenge of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U. S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”
Kaplan will be joining The University of Texas at Austin as a Distinguished Senior Lecturer. Kaplan will teach undergraduate and graduate courses, participate in our public events, and mentor students. This spring, he will offer “Great Thinkers in Realism and Geopolitics” (CIV 365) through the School of Civic Leadership. Students will explore works from twentieth-century geopolitical authors such as Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, Halford Mackinder, and Zbigniew Brzezinski; discuss current and historical geopolitical issues in a seminar format; and identify connections between these works and international politics today.
