Biography - James R Sofka

James R. Sofka is Associate Professor of International Relations at APUS, where he teaches courses in international relations theory, American foreign policy, and war and conflict resolution. He also serves as Adjunct Faculty at the Federal Executive Institute, where he teaches courses in European politics and the American Founding period. He previously taught in these fields along with early American foreign policy in the Department of Politics in the University of Virginia from 1993-2006, where he also served as Dean of the Honors program in the College of Arts and Sciences. He received his M.A. in 1991 and Ph.D. in 1995 from the University of Virginia and his A.B. with Honors in Government from Franklin and Marshall College in 1989.

A Jefferson scholar, Dr. Sofka has published widely on Jefferson’s foreign policy and has presented lectures on the subject at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, where he has held two fellowships, as well as for the Brookings Institution. He co-taught a seminar on Jefferson’s foreign policy at Monticello and has participated in international conferences under its auspices. Along with other leading scholars, Dr. Sofka appeared in the 2010 documentary “Jefferson” broadcast nationally on the History Channel. He recently edited a volume of articles by leading American and European scholars on America’s role in the Mediterranean region during Jefferson’s presidency and is finishing a book-length study of Jefferson’s foreign policy entitled “A Commerce Which Must be Protected”: The International Policy of Thomas Jefferson, 1785-1809.” His most current book, Metternich, Jefferson, and the Enlightenment: Statecraft and Political Theory in the Early Nineteenth Century, was published in December 2011.

Dr. Sofka regularly lectures on issues of American and European foreign policy to a variety of federal agency and military audiences in Washington, D.C. He resides in Ivy, Virginia, serves on an advisory board of Albemarle County, and is active in several community organizations. An amateur carpenter, he spends many of his spare hours working on his historic 1897 home.