The Hoover Institution

Eric Wakin is the deputy director of the Hoover Institution and the Robert H. Malott Director of the Institution’s library and archives, overseeing their strategic direction and operations.

Wakin is the author of Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand. His current research interest is guns and gun control in the nineteenth-century United States and he is revising a manuscript titled "From Flintlock to ‘Tramps' Terror’: Guns and Gun Control in Nineteenth-Century New York City.” He has also coauthored a number of walking-tour books and travel guides.

Before coming to Hoover, Wakin was the Herbert H. Lehman Curator for American History and the Curator of Manuscripts at the Rare Book & 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.

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 received a BA in English literature from Columbia University; an MA in Southeast Asian studies and an MA in political science from the University of Michigan, where he was a FLAS Fellow; and a PhD in history from Columbia, where he was a Richard Hofstadter Fellow and a President’s Fellow.