Professional development & events
Writing the History of U.S. Foreign Relations in an Age of Crisis
Yale University, New Haven, CT | June 21–25, 2025
Facilitators: Alvita Akiboh (Yale University) & Michael Brenes (Yale University)
About the 2025 Summer Institute
The largest land war in Europe since World War II, looming conflict with China, war in Gaza, and instability in states such as Haiti, Syria, and Afghanistan have fundamentally reshaped global affairs. These conflicts exist alongside unprecedented rates of economic and racial inequality, the escalating havoc wrought by climate change, and the reemergence of autocratic figures in the United States and around the world. Indeed, the world is currently embroiled in what commentators have called a “polycrisis.”
These crises present challenges and opportunities for historians of U.S. foreign relations to explore the origins of our current moment, to offer scholars and the public nuanced perspectives on how to understand our world. Yet the historical profession—and the humanities broadly—is in the throes of its own crisis. Decades of austerity, neglect, and precarity have eroded the historical discipline—and the ranks of historians— with many scholars of U.S. foreign relations unable to secure tenure-track positions or produce enduring scholarship in alternative careers.
Key Questions
In this light, we ask crucial questions about the role of historians of the United States and the world at this critical juncture:
- What role can history serve to inform in our age of crisis?
- How should historians of U.S. foreign relations write history in an age of crisis?
- What key themes and subjects should be the focus of the field given the turbulence of our age?
- How can we situate and comprehend our professional crisis within the context of a global “polycrisis?”
We will seek to answer these questions and others, while also helping a cohort of young scholars to develop sophisticated and nuanced perspectives that will shape their work on the inevitable crises of the future.
Participants
Introducing the 2025 Cohort
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Benjamin Allison, University of Texas at Austin, Through the Cracks of Détente: The End of the Cold War in the Middle East
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Yoram Carboex, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Leaving No Nodule Unturned? A History of the International Governance of Deep-Sea Minerals
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Grace Easterly, University of Connecticut, Cold War Chokepoints: U.S. Empire, Freedom of Navigation, and Sovereignty at Sea
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Victoria Gonzalez Maltes, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, "They are good human stock": Refugee Resettlement in the United States after World War II, 1948-1956
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Hayden Kolowrat, Indiana University-Bloomington
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Thomas Pelchat, Southern Methodist University, The Gas Shall Not Flow: President Reagan and the 1981–2 Siberian Pipeline Sanctions
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Aimée Plukker, Cornell University, Europe Calling: Cold War U.S. Tourism and the Production of "the West"
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Sean Raming, University of Notre Dame, A Ghost at the Bargaining Table: Organized Labor in Cold War Defense Production
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Rashida Shafiq, Southern Methodist University, “From Toledo to Tamil Nadu": A Study of Gloria Steinem in India, 1957-1959
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Alex Southgate, Temple University, Speak Truth to Global Power: Transnational Quaker Activism, 1945–1975
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Jack Werner, University of Maryland, College Park, The Making of Colonial Disability and Labor in the United States and the Philippines, 1898-1916
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Sally Yi, Princeton University, Capital Conquest: Japanese Investment in Postwar Seattle
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