Fredrik Logevall, professor of history, has been named the John S. Knight Professor of International Studies at Cornell and director of the university's Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies beginning Jan. 1, 2010.

Logevall succeeds Nicolas van de Walle, professor of government, who directed the Einaudi Center from January 2004 to December 2008. Professor Emeritus Gilbert Levine, interim director, will continue in that capacity through the end of the calendar year.

Logevall is a specialist on U.S. foreign relations and is the author of numerous books and articles. He teaches courses covering the history of U.S. diplomacy and foreign policy, the international history of the Cold War and the Vietnam War.

His most recent book is "Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969-1977" (co-edited with Andrew Preston, a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University), which was published by Oxford University Press in 2008. In October he will publish "America's Cold War" (co-authored with Campbell Craig, professor of international relations at the University of Southampton). He is writing a book-length study of the struggle for Indochina after 1940.

In 2007 Logevall was the Leverhulme Professor of History at the University of Nottingham and Mellon Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He previously taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he co-founded the Center for Cold War Studies. A native of Sweden, he earned a doctorate from Yale University in 1993 and has been a member of Cornell's Department of History since 2004.

The Einaudi Center was founded in 1961 to enhance the international dimensions of Cornell's curriculum and facilitate interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching.