About
AT A GLANCE:
Head of Broadening Academia Initiative, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for
Advanced Holocaust Studies
RESEARCH AREAS:
• U.S. Foreign Relations
• Modern Europe
• Intelligence
• Transnational/Transimperial History
BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Susan McCall Perlman is a historian of U.S. foreign relations and intelligence. She currently leads the
Broadening Academia Initiative at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced
Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and teaches at Georgetown
University. She is a decorated former intelligence officer, most recently serving
on the faculty of the National Intelligence University (NIU) as Professor of Intelligence
Studies and Provost. Her research and teaching focus on modern France, diplomatic
history, and intelligence through the lenses of transnationalism and emotion. In 2020,
she was awarded the Robert Beland Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching at NIU.
She is the author of Contesting France: U.S. Intelligence and Foreign Policy in the
Early Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Besides her native language, English,
Perlman speaks French and Italian.
PUBLICATIONS:
• BOOKS:
Contesting France: Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War
(Cambridge University Press, February 2023)
• BOOK CHAPTERS:
“Covert Action in Postwar France,” in Covert Action in the Early Cold War: Rethinking
Western Covert Operations against International Communism, in progress/forthcoming.
• REFEREED ARTICLES:
“The Future of Intelligence Analysis: Looking Beyond our Boundaries,” Studies in Intelligence
64, no 3. (September 2020), with co-author Wes Westbrooks.
“US Intelligence and Communist Plots in Postwar France,” Intelligence and National
Security.
(Published online November 23, 2017, in print Volume 33, No. 3 2018)
“Contesting France: French Informants and American Intelligence in the Dawning Cold
War,” Cold War History.
(Published online July 24, 2016, in print Volume 17, No 1. March 2017)
• BOOK REVIEWS:
H-Diplo Roundtable (contributor) on How to Stage a Coup by Rory Cormac
(February 2023)
Review, Marianne is Watching: Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and the Origins of
the French Surveillance State by Deborah Bauer, H-Diplo, February 2023.
Review, The Liberation of Paris by Jean Smith, American Intelligence Journal, Spring 2021, with co-author William Colligan.
Review, Spying Through a Glass Darkly: American Espionage against the Soviet Union, 1945-1946 by David Alvarez and Eduard Marks, H-Federal History, September 7, 2017.
Review, In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones,
Journal of Intelligence History. Published online January 1, 2017, in print Volume 16, No. 2. July 2017.
• OTHER PUBLICATIONS:
Contributor, “Reflections on the 2016 SHAFR European Institute,” Passport: The Society
for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review Volume 47, No 3. January 2017.