Michael Haltzel is Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute, Johns Hopkins University SAIS.  From 1994 to 2005, Dr. Haltzel served as Democratic Staff Director, Subcommittee on European Affairs, Senate Foreign Relations Committee and European policy advisor to President (then-Senator) Joseph R. Biden, Jr. In 2009-10 Dr. Haltzel headed U.S. Government delegations to three multi-week OSCE review conferences in Warsaw, Copenhagen, and Vienna.

His other previous positions include Chief of the European Division, Library of Congress; Director of West European Studies, Woodrow Wilson Center; Vice President for Academic Affairs, Longwood University (Virginia); and Deputy Director, Aspen Institute Berlin.  In 2015-16 he was Visiting Senior Fellow, Finnish Institute of International Affairs.

The author of Der Abbau der deutschen ständischen Selbstverwaltung in den Ostseeprovinzen Russlands 1855-1905 (Marburg, 1977), Dr. Haltzel is coauthor, editor, or coeditor of nine other books and author of dozens of refereed scholarly articles.  His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, POLITICO and U.S. News & World Report.  Haltzel is a frequent commentator on U.S. and European electronic media and was for several years a blogger for the Huffington Post.

Haltzel received a B.A. magna cum laude from Yale where he played football, basketball, and tennis for Timothy Dwight College and was a member of Berzelius.  He earned an M.A. (Soviet Studies) and Ph.D. (History) from Harvard.  Dr. Haltzel is the recipient of state decorations from seven European Union countries:  Austria, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Sweden.