On Monday, July 1, 2013, Eric Wakin was appointed as associate director of the Hoover Institution and director of the Library and Archives. Before coming to Hoover, Wakin was the Herbert H. Lehman Curator for American History and the Curator of Manuscripts at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, where he also taught courses in the History Department, on public history, memory and narrative, archives and knowledge, and theory. Wakin is the author of Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand.
He has also worked in business development, competitive intelligence, strategic communications, and digital strategy at Ernst & Young, IBM Custom Publishing, Kroll, PaulHastings, and Technology Investor. He continues to advise corporate and nonprofit entities on history and archive-related issues and consults on leadership and operational effectiveness in libraries and special collections. Wakin has a PhD in US history from Columbia and two MAs, in political science and Southeast Asian studies, from the University of Michigan.
