A Nebraska native, Robert L. Beisner did undergraduate work at Hastings College and took his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago, before teaching briefly at the latter and Colgate University.  He taught at American University from 1965 to 1998, serving nine years as department chair.  In 2002, he was President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).  He lives in Washington with his wife Valerie French, a historian of the ancient Mediterranean.

He is the author, most recently, of Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2006), which received both the Robert H. Ferrell distinguished scholarship award from SHAFR and the Arthur Ross Silver Medal Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations.  He also wrote Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898-1900 (1968), which, as a dissertation, received the Allan Nevins from the Society of American Historians and, as a book, the John Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association; and From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865-1900 (1975, 2d edition 1986).  He is the editor of a two-volume bibliography, American Foreign Relations since 1600: A Guide to the Literature.  He has also written numerous articles and reviews.