Hilde Restad is an Associate Professor of International Studies at Oslo New University College in Oslo, Norway.

She obtained her MA and PhD in Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia. 

Hilde’s research interests cover American politics, U.S. foreign policy, American history and international relations. Her dissertation was on the concept of American exceptionalism understood as an identity, and its effect on history U.S. foreign policy traditions. This was further developed in her first book, American Exceptionalism: An Idea that Made a Nation and Remade the World. Before attaining her position as Associate Professor, she was Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). Hilde is often used as an analyst of American politics in Norwegian media, and in 2020 she developed and co-hosted a podcast miniseries in Norwegian on the historical development of American political institutions. Hilde’s latest book is a Norwegian explainer of the American political system, called The American Paradox (Cappelen Damm, 2022). 

In the fall of 2024, Hilde was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin. While there, she completed on a co-edited manuscript titled American Exceptionalism and U.S. Foreign Policy: How Narratives Shape the United States in the World, under contract with Georgetown University Press.