Samuel Helfont, Ph.D.

Samuel Helfont is associate professor of Strategy and Policy in the Naval War College program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He specializes in the international history of the Middle East and is the author of “The Iraq Wars: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford, 2025), “Iraq against the World” (Oxford, 2023), and “Compulsion in Religion” (Oxford, 2018). He co-edited “Ba‘thist Iraq through Archives” (Stanford, 2026), and has written articles in a range of academic journals and the popular press. He earned a PhD from Princeton and completed a three-year post-doc at Penn. He served as a U.S. Navy intelligence officer, is an Iraq War veteran and a Golden Shellback.