Christopher McKnight Nichols is Professor of History and Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies, at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, at The Ohio State University. Previously Nichols was Director of the Oregon State University Center for the Humanities, Associate Professor of History, and Sandy and Elva Sanders Eminent Professor in the Honors College, and founder and director of OSU's Citizenship and Crisis Initiative. Nichols is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and an Organization of American Historians (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer. He specializes in the intellectual history of the U.S.'s role in the world, including American intellectual, cultural, political, and foreign policy history from the Gilded Age and Progressive Era through the twentieth century, with a focus on isolationism, internationalism, and globalization. Dr. Nichols is author, co-author, or editor of six books. Nichols' forthcoming book, co-edited with David Milne, is Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations (Columbia University Press, 2022). His most recent book is co-edited and co-authored with Elizabeth Borgwardt and Andrew Preston is entitled Rethinking American Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2021). Nichols is most well-known for authoring Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age (Harvard University Press, 2011; paperback, 2015). Nichols co-edited, with Nancy Unger, the Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Wiley Blackwell, 2017, new paperback 2022); Nichols also co-edited and co-authored, with Charles Mathewes, Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America's Imminent Secularization from the Puritans to the Present Day (Oxford University Press, 2008). Nichols was Senior Editor, with David Milne, and editor-in-chief Timothy Lynch, of the two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History (Oxford University Press, 2013). Other books projects in the works include a study of early Cold War conservative foreign policy, isolationism, and a sweeping global account of anti-imperialism.
Nichols is a frequent commentator or radio, television, online, and in print on politics and foreign policy. He has presented papers and published articles and opinion pieces in academic journals and newspapers on subjects including U.S. engagement with the world, transnationalism, the Spanish-American War, race and segregation, isolationism and internationalism, pacifism, WWI, WWII, influenza pandemic of 1918, national security debates, progressivism, pluralism, trans-Atlantic liberal reform, the philosophy of history, deliberative democracy, anti-imperialism, interwar American political economy, neutrality legislation, the Monroe Doctrine, the media and politics, religion and secular thought, grand strategy, and the historical foundations of current American foreign policy.
Nichols studied at Harvard College, Wesleyan University, and the University of Virginia, where he received his M.A. and Ph.D. in History. In 2008-09 Nichols was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He then was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in U.S. History at the University of Pennsylvania. Nichols was honored as the Oregon State University Honors College Professor of the Year in 2014. During his time as an instructor at UVa, Penn, and OSU Nichols was awarded four teaching honors. Nichols teaches courses on the history of the U.S.'s role in and with the world, isolationism and internationalism, the Progressive Era, international relations and diplomacy, intellectual, cultural, and political history.
