Stephen Buono is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School. Buono is a historian of ideas, international relations, and science and technology, particularly spaceflight. He is the author of two books on the interplay of these subjects: The Province of All Mankind: How Outer Space Became American Foreign Policy (Cornell, 2025) and Governing the Moon: A History (NASA, 2025), as well as numerous articles and book chapters for both scholarly and popular audiences.
Before joining the Hamilton School, he was a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and held posts at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
Buono is now at work on a book about universities in the American Century. This new research will narrate the birth and maturation of a profound modern commitment: to recruit higher education to the exercise of global power.
“The Devil’s Glow: Nuclear Weapons and the Space Environment,” in NASA and the Environment, eds. Neil Maher and Brian Odom (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
“The Interplanetary School of IR,” International History Review 46, no. 2 (2024): 242–260.
“The History of Space Security,” in Oxford Handbook of Space Security, Eds. Saadia M. Pakkanen and P. J. Blount (Oxford University Press, 2024).
“Need something more to worry about? Here comes space junk,” Chicago Tribune, November 22, 2021.
“Fear about China’s new space weapon echoes older worries about war from space,” The Washington Post, October 26, 2021.
“It’s Time to Reignite U.S.-Russian Space Cooperation: Nuclear Power May Hold the Key,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 77, no. 4 (July 21, 2021): 203-06.
“‘Merely a Scrap of Paper’? The Outer Space Treaty in Historical Perspective,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 31, no. 2 (June 2020): 350–72.
“Sanctuary or Battlefield? Fighting for the Soul of American Space Policy,” Perspectives on History 58, no. 5A (2020).
“For Sale: The Moon,” The Hill, October 20, 2020.
“‘This Grim Game’: Kennedy and Arms Control for Outer Space,” Diplomatic History 43, no. 5 (November 2019): 840–66.
