EXPERTISE:

1. Foreign Affairs

2. Politics

3. American Defense and Security

4. The Presidency

Marc Jay Selverstone is an associate professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center and chair of the Center’s Presidential Recordings Program. 

As chair of the Recordings Program, Selverstone edits the secret White House tapes of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. He is the general editor of The Presidential Recordings Digital Edition, the primary online portal for transcripts of the tapes, published by the University of Virginia Press. 

He also edits the Miller Center’s “Studies on the Presidency” series (Virginia) and is the editor of A Companion to John F. Kennedy (Wiley-Blackwell).

His scholarship focuses on presidents and presidential decision-making, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s. He has written for journals and edited volumes on the Kennedy presidency, the Cold War, and the American war in Vietnam. He is the author of Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945-1950 (2009), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His most recent book is The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (2022).

Selverstone has a BA degree in philosophy from Trinity College (CT), a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University and a PhD in history from Ohio University.