Bartholomew (“Bat”) Sparrow is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He is Professor of Government at The University of Texas at Austin, and the author of The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security (2015). His scholarship examines different aspects of American political development, particularly the interaction between national and extranational factors in the political, societal, and cultural development of the United States. He is the author of From the Outside In: World War II and the American State, Uncertain Guardians: The News Media as a Political Institution, and The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire. He is currently completing a book entitled “The Third Founding,” an in-depth study of bonded servitude, the white poor, and the establishment of the United States.

He has co-edited two other books, The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion, 1803-1898, and Politics, Discourse and American Society: New Agendas, and has contributed to leading political science journals, such as Studies in American Political Development, Perspectives on Politics, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Political Communication, Political Science Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, and American Political Science Review. He serves on the editorial boards of Studies in American Political Development, Journal of Policy History, Texas National Security Review, and PS: Politics and Political Science.

He has been a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Kennedy School of Government, the Newberry Library, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Harry S. Truman Library Institute. In 2018 he named among the “Texas Ten,” an annual list of inspiring teachers nominated by their former students and selected by The University of Texas Alumni Association, the Texas Exes. He is a native of Annapolis, Maryland.