Journalist and author; NYU and NYU Abu Dhabi
James Traub is a journalist, author and scholar. Since 2010 he has been teaching classes on American foreign policy and on intellectual history at NYU Abu Dhabi and at NYU.
He worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1993 to 1998, as a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine from 1998 to 2011, as a columnist and contributor for foreignpolicy.com from 2009 to 2022. He has written extensively about foreign affairs, national politics, urban affairs, and education in publications including The New York Review of Books , The New Republic, The Atlantic and Harper's . He writes regularly for the New York Times Op-Ed page. His most recent book is The Cradle of Citizenship , on civic education. Among his other books are True Believer, a biography of Hubert Humphrey; What Was Liberalism? ; and John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit . He is the author of the Substack, “A Democracy, If You Can Keep It.” He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Institute For The Humanities and the Society of American Historians.
