Russell Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where he co-directs the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. He holds a courtesy appointment at the Freeman Spogli Institute. He formerly served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and has been awarded a Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for research in Berlin; he has also been honored with the Bundesverdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany.

His books include The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (1988) and Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (1998), both of which won the Outstanding Book Award of the German Studies Association. Some of his other books include Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem (2004), Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007) and Freedom or Terror: Europe Faces Jihad (2010). In his books and many articles Berman has written widely on the cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critical theory, and cultural dimensions of trans-Atlantic relations, as well as on topics between Europe and the Middle East. His commentary on current events has appeared in The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times Internationale Politik, Telos, Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Review Books, die Welt, die Neue Zuercher Zeitung, die Weltwoche,  and American Greatness and elsewhere.

Coit Blacker is a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Olivier Nomellini Professor Emeritus in International Studies at the School of Humanities and Sciences, and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. He served as director of FSI from 2003 to 2012. From 2005 to 2011, he was co-chair of the International Initiative of the Stanford Challenge, and from 2004 to 2007, served as a member of the Development Committee of the university's Board of Trustees.

During the first Clinton administration, Blacker served as special assistant to the president for National Security Affairs and senior director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council (NSC). At the NSC, he oversaw the implementation of U.S. policy toward Russia and the New Independent States, while also serving as principal staff assistant to the president and the National Security Advisor on matters relating to the former Soviet Union.

Following his government service, Blacker returned to Stanford to resume his research and teaching. From 1998 to 2003, he also co-directed the Aspen Institute's U.S.-Russia Dialogue, which brought together prominent U.S. and Russian specialists on foreign and defense policy for discussion and review of critical issues in the bilateral relationship. He was a study group member of the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (the Hart-Rudman Commission) throughout the commission's tenure.

In 2001, Blacker was the recipient of the Laurence and Naomi Carpenter Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford.

Blacker holds an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Far Eastern Studies for his work on U.S.-Russian relations. He is a graduate of Occidental College (A.B., Political Science) and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (M.A., M.A.L.D., and Ph.D).

Blacker's association with Stanford began in 1977, when he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship by the Arms Control and Disarmament Program, the precursor to the Center for International Security and Cooperation at FSI.