Rob Konkel is a global historian of modern geopolitics and political economy. His scholarship focuses on the last great crisis of globalization—the transwar decades from the 1880s through the 1940s—and asks how networks of state and non-state interests managed the frictions of economic and political interdependence in a multipolar world. 

His book project, Building Blocs: Raw Materials and the Global Economy in the Age of Disequilibrium, centers strategic minerals in a global history of trade, finance, and geopolitics through the years of total war. 

Rob is presently a postdoctoral associate in Yale’s International Security Studies program. He holds degrees from Princeton, Oxford, and the University of Saskatchewan.