Bertrand Patenaude

Bertrand M. Patenaude teaches history, international relations, and human rights at Stanford, where he is a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH) and a Lecturer at the Center for Biomedical Ethics (SCBE). His courses include seminars on United Nations peacekeeping, genocide, famine in the modern world, and humanitarian aid. His first book, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford University Press, 2002), won the 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize and was the basis of a PBS documentary film broadcast in 2011. His most recent book was Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, published by HarperCollins in 2009. His previous work, A Wealth of Ideas: Revelations from the Hoover Institution Archives (Stanford University Press, 2006), is a generously illustrated large-format book featuring rare documents, photographs, posters, and artifacts from the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford. Patenaude is the editor of several books, including The Russian Revolution and Stalin and Stalinism. His documentary film credits include associate producer of the Emmy Award-winning PBS film Inside the USSR and of the FRONTLINE documentary A Journey to Russia, and story editor of Stalin's Ghost, an NBC News Special Report. He was educated at Boston College and the University of Vienna and received his PhD in History from Stanford in 1987. He taught for eight years (1992-2000) in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where his outstanding performance as a classroom instructor was recognized with the Schieffelin Award for Teaching Excellence for two consecutive years (1998, 1999). Patenaude has lectured throughout Europe for Stanford Travel/Study, Smithsonian Journeys, and Lindblad Expeditions.