Education

BA, University of Toronto (1996)

MSc, London School of Economics (1998)

PhD, University of Cambridge (2001)

Biography

I specialize in the history of American foreign relations, primarily since 1890. More specifically, my teaching and research interests lie in three main areas: the ideas and concepts that motivate and shape America's behavior in the world at both the elite and popular levels; the mechanics of foreign policymaking in Washington; and the intersections between the national and the international, the foreign and the domestic, including the influence of domestic politics and culture—particularly religion—on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.

Before joining UVA in 2025, I taught at Cambridge University for nearly 20 years, where I was Professor of American History and a Fellow of Clare College. I was elected President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) in 2020-21.

I have a new book, Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security, published by Belknap/Harvard. My next book, "The Road to Infamy: The United States and the Origins of  World War II in Asia and the Pacific, 1931-41," will be published by Henry Holt in the US and Penguin/Allen Lane in the UK.

Publications

Books: Authored

Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security (Belknap/Harvard, 2025)

American Foreign Relations: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2019)

Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (Knopf, 2012)

The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (Harvard, 2006)

Books: Edited

The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, Volume 2: Escalation and Stalemate, 1963-1968, general editor Lien-Hang T. Nguyen (Cambridge, 2024)

America in the World: A History in Documents since 1898, revised and updated edition, with Jeffrey A. Engel and Mark Atwood Lawrence (Princeton, 2023). Originally published as America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror (Princeton, 2014)

Rethinking American Grand Strategy, with Elizabeth Borgwardt and Christopher McKnight Nichols (Oxford, 2021)

The Cambridge History of America and the World, Volume 3: 1900-1945, with Brooke L. Blower; general editor Mark Philip Bradley (Cambridge, 2021)

Outside In: The Transnational Circuitry of U.S. History, with Doug Rossinow (Oxford, 2017)

Faithful Republic: Religion and Politics in the 20th Century United States, with Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Penn, 2015)

Nixon in the World: U.S. Foreign Relations, 1969-1977, with Fredrik Logevall (Oxford, 2008)

Recent Articles

"The Emperor Is Dead—Long Live the Empire: The Enduring Legacy of the Imperial Presidency," Modern American History, vol. 6 (July 2023): 259-64

"The Limits of Brotherhood: Race, Religion, and World Order in American Ecumenical Protestantism," American Historical Review, vol. 127 (September 2022): 1222-51

"From Dong Dang to Da Nang: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Thirty Years War for Asia," Diplomatic History, vol. 46 (January 2022): 1-34

"The Fearful Giant: National Insecurity and U.S. Foreign Policy,” in Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories, ed. Christopher McKnight Nichols and David Milne (Columbia, 2022), 169-84

"An American Crusade: The Religious Liberty of Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union," in Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars: New Directions in a Divided America, ed. Darren Dochuk (Notre Dame, 2021), 154-77

"Standards for a Righteous and Civilized World: Religion and America’s Emergence as a Global Power," in Christianity and International Law: An Introduction, ed. John Haskell and Pamela Slotte (Cambridge, 2021), 223-45

"America’s Global Imperium," in The Oxford World History of Empire, ed. Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel (Oxford, 2021), 1217-48