Daniel Benjamin is the president of the American Academy in Berlin.
Prior to his Academy appointment, Benjamin was the Norman E. McCulloch Jr. Director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. Before he arrived at Dartmouth, in 2013, he served as Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the US Department of State from 2009-2012.
Benjamin was a senior fellow in foreign policy studies and director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. He has also been a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. He spent more than five years on the National Security Council staff in the 1990s, where he served first as foreign-policy speechwriter and special assistant to President Bill Clinton and later as director for transnational threats.
Benjamin has written extensively on US foreign policy, terrorism, and international affairs. He is co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror (2002), which was awarded the Arthur Ross Prize of the Council on Foreign Relations and named a 2002 New York Times Notable Bookand a Washington Post Best Book. He also co-authored The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right (2005), a Washington Post and Financial Times Best Book of the Year and a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, New York Review of Books, Politico, and many other publications.
Benjamin began his career as a journalist and was Germany bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal and Germany correspondent for TIME. He received a master’s degree from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. He is a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the Council of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, as well as the advisory boards of several NGOs.