Erez Manela is the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches international history and the history of the United States in the world. His current work examines the global discourse about World War II as a "race war" and how it shaped visions for the postwar international order.

He is the author of the prize-winning book The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (2007) and co-editor of four collaborative volumes: The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (2010), Empires at War, 1911-1923 (2014), The Development Century: A Global History (2018), and The Anticolonial Transnational: Imaginaries, Mobilities, and Networks in the Struggle against Empire (2023). Major articles include "A Pox on Your Narrative: Writing Disease Control into Cold War History" (2010) and "International society as a Historical Subject" (2020), the latter reflecting a longstanding interest in the conceptual and methodological aspects of writing international history.

Manela is director of graduate programs at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (where he also served as acting center director in 2022-23) and the longtime co-chair of the Harvard International and Global History Seminar (HIGHS). In addition, he co-edits the book series on Global and International History at Cambridge University Press.