Joseph Preston Baratta is a historian of the world federalist movement and of efforts to strengthen the United Nations. He is Professor Emeritus of History and Political Science at Worcester State University in Massachusetts, where he taught international relations, globalization, the United Nations, world history, American and English history, and the history of science and technology before retiring with emeritus status in 2018.
Baratta was educated at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, and earned his Ph.D. in history from Boston University in 1982, with a dissertation on the origins of the world government movement, 1937 to 1947. From 1985 to 1988 he worked in the United Nations community in New York, directing the U.N. office of the World Federalists. He has also taught at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Boston College, and he was a founding member and chair of the executive committee of the Coalition for a Strong United Nations. He serves as a senior advisor and co-director of the Center for Global Community and World Law.
His principal work is the two-volume study The Politics of World Federation (Praeger, 2004), covering the United Nations, U.N. reform, and atomic control in the first volume and the path from world federalism to global governance in the second. His earlier publications include Strengthening the United Nations: A Bibliography on U.N. Reform and World Federalism (Greenwood Press, 1987). His research has been supported by a United States Institute of Peace grant for monographs on international verification, peacekeeping, arbitration, and human rights.
