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.