Russell Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where he co-directs the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. He formerly served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State with a focus on transatlantic relations and as a member of the Commission on Inalienable Rights. In addition, he is a member of the National Humanities Council.

Berman has been awarded a Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for research in Berlin; he has also been honored with the Federal Service Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany. His books include The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma, and Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture, both of which won the Outstanding Book Award of the German Studies Association. Some of his other books include Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem,, Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture, and Freedom or Terror: Europe Faces Jihad (2010). He has edited several translations of works by Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt.

His commentary on current events has appeared in The National Interest, The Hill, Politico, American Greatness, Tablet, First Things, the Wall Street Journal (international edition), Internationale Politik, Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Review Books, die Welt, die Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and elsewhere. He has served in numerous administrative capacities at Stanford, where he directed the Overseas Studies Program as well as major programs in general education. For fifteen years he was the editor of Telos, a journal of critical theory, and he served as the 2011 President of the Modern Language Association.