Dr. Erin Mahan is Chief Historian of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Director of the Pentagon Library. She previously served as associate research fellow at Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.
From 2004-2008, she was Chief of the Division of Arms Control, Asia, and Africa in the Office of the Historian at the Department of State, where she edited several volumes in the Foreign Relations of the United States series related to Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the former Soviet Union, the Vietnam War, and Korea. She is also the author of Kennedy, De Gaulle and Western Europe (Palgrave, 2002), co-author of The Great War: A World War I Collector’s Vault (2013), General Editor of the Secretaries of Defense Historical Series and has published several chapters and articles on biological and chemical weapons, NATO, U.S.-French foreign economic policies, and civil-military relations.
She was a contributing staff writer for the Report of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism (GPO, 2008). From 2008-2011, she served as a nationally elected Council member for the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations. In 2010, she was appointed to the National Historical Publications & Records Commission.
In 2015, she was appointed to the Historical Advisory Board of the World War I Centennial Commission. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.