Dr. Douglas Brinkley currently serves as director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilization and Professor of History at Tulane University. He completed his bachelor’s degree at Ohio State University and received his doctorate in U.S. Diplomatic History from Georgetown University in 1989. He then spent a year at both the U.S. Naval Academy and Princeton University teaching history. While a professor at Hofstra University, Dr. Brinkley spearheaded the American Odyssey course, in which he took students on numerous cross-country treks where they visited historic sites and met seminal figures in politics and literature. Dr. Brinkley’s 1994 book, The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey chronicled his first experience teaching this innovative on-the-road class which became the progenitor of C-SPAN’s Yellow School Bus.

Four of Dr. Brinkley’s biographies have been selected as New York Times "Notable Books of the Year": Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years (1992), Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal, with Townsend Hoopes (1992), The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House (1998), and Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company and a Century of Progress (2003). And his three most recent publications have become New York Times best-sellers: The Boys of Pointe du Hoc; Ronald Reagan, D-Day and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion (2005), Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War (2004) and Parish Priest: Father McGivney and American Catholicism (2006).

Before coming to Tulane, Dr. Brinkley served as Stephen E. Ambrose Professor of History and Director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans. During his tenure there he wrote two books with the late Professor Ambrose: Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938 (1997) and The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today (2002). On the literature front, Dr. Brinkley has edited Jack Kerouac’s diaries, Hunter S. Thompson’s letters, and Theodore Dreiser’s travelogue. His work on civil rights includes Rosa Parks (2000) and the forthcoming Portable Civil Rights Reader with Julian Bond.

He won the Benjamin Franklin Award for The American Heritage History of the United States (1998), was awarded the Business Week Book of the Year Award for Wheels for the World, and was also named 2004 Humanist of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. He has received honorary doctorates from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

Dr. Brinkley is contributing editor for Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and American Heritage. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic Monthly, he is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Century Club. In a recent profile the Chicago Tribune deemed him "America’s new past master."

Forthcoming publications include a two-volume edition of Ronald Reagan’s unpublished White House diaries and Cowboy Conservationist: Theodore Roosevelt and the Wilderness.

He lives in New Orleans with his wife Anne and two children Benton and Johnny.