SHAFR wrote to the leadership of the University of Nottingham strongly encourage it to reverse its decision to close all the degree programs in the Department of American and Canadian Studies.

Letter of Support for Department of American and Canadian Studies.pdf

Ernest May Fellowship in History and Policy

The Ernest May Fellowships honor Ernest May, Charles Warren Professor of American History, a member of the Belfer Center's board of directors, and a faculty affiliate of the Center's International Security Program, who passed away in June 2009.

The Ernest May Fellows are housed with the International Security Program fellows and participate in the activities of the Center as part of the International Security Program. They will have access to most Harvard University libraries and facilities. Fredrik Logevall, Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs, and Niall Ferguson, Belfer Center Senior Faculty Fellow, serve as the points of contact and mentors for the fellows.

Call for Abstracts

Peace in the Age of Forever Wars

SHAFR UK-Ireland Network CfP

Following the success of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) UK-Ireland online seminar, we would like to capitalise on the collaboration and collegiality of the network members and host a one-day work in progress workshop at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.

SHAFR
JANUARY AWARDS
Deadline: 15 October

Applicants MUST be members of SHAFR to be eligible for awards. Visit https://www.shafr.org/awards
to apply.

Cologne Center for Advanced Studies in International History and Law (CHL)

PhD position (f/m/x) - Rethinking Global Governance 

Call for Papers for the SHAFR 2026 Annual Meeting

2026 Conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations

The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, June 25–27, 2026

The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) invites proposals for its 2026
annual conference. The deadline for proposals is December 1, 2025.

CFP: SHAFR Summer Institute on “Strategic Cultures” at The Ohio State University-Mershon Center for International Security Studies (June 20-24, 2026)

Historically, international relations has fluctuated between periods of crisis and periods of relative stability. Some refer to our current age as one of sustained “polycrisis,” unleashed by what Chinese President Xi Jinping calls the “great changes unseen in a century.” Of course there has hardly been much peace or stability in the past 150 years, but the last time the world was in such a state of multipolar instability and insecurity was probably the 1930s. We are now at another threshold moment in which America’s place in the world may well be in the process of being transformed as well as reimagined. If history is any guide, some of this new thinking will endure; most of it will become obsolete.

SHAFR Recognizes Outstanding Scholarship and Service at the 2025 Annual Meeting

The Betty M. Unterberger Dissertation Prize Committee–Nicole Anslover (chair), Samantha Payne, and Nicole Phelps—has awarded the 2025 prize to Daniel Chardell for his dissertation "The Gulf War: An International History, 1989-1991."  It was completed at Harvard University under the direction of Erez Manela.  In this examination of the 1991 Gulf War, Chardell argues for new interpretations of the end of the Cold War.  He analyzes Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait through the lens of new understandings of the global balance of power amidst the collapse of a Communist superpower.  Through multinational archival work, Chardell explains how differing U.S. and Arab visions of sovereignty helped shape foreign relations in the post-Cold War world. This dissertation will spark new conversations about the Gulf War and greater international relations at the end of the 20th century.
 
The committee also awarded Honorable Mention to David Helps for his dissertation, “Securing the World City: Policing, Migration, and the Struggle for Global Los Angeles, 1973-1994,” which was completed at the University of Michigan with advisor Matthew D. Lassiter.  In it, Helps crafts a transnational urban history that examines the transformation of Los Angeles during the twenty years Tom Bradley served as mayor, a period of dramatic growth in the city’s population and its economic role as a port city.  In examining contests over downtown redevelopment, security at the 1984 Olympics, and the Rodney King verdict, Helps brings together an impressive range of scholarship and archival research to illustrate how action at multiple scales came together in a specific place. 
 
Congratulations also go to Kaitlin Simpson for receiving Honorable Mention for her dissertation, "The Flowers of El Dorado: Gender, Production, and the Cut Flower Industry in the United States and Colombia, 1908-Present.”  Completed at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, under the supervision of Tore Olsson, it is a creative and beautifully written history of the cut flower industry in the United States and Colombia during the twentieth century.  Simpson draws the reader in through a gendered analysis of the ascent of the cut flower industry, moving seamlessly between the U.S. and Latin America and drawing on a wide range of methodologies to explain how and why cut flowers were produced and consumed.  The committee especially appreciated the way she captures the experiences and perspectives of women workers in Colombian flower fields by reading corporate archives against the grain.  
 
The winner of the 2025 Marilyn Blatt Young Dissertation Completion Fellowship is Margie Tang-Whitworth, a Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Minnesota.  Her dissertation--“‘The Oriental Julia Child’: Chinese American Cuisine, Gendered Orientalism, and the Cold War”—is an exciting and thought-provoking study that examines how four Chinese American female celebrity chefs influenced popular U.S. perceptions of foreign relations, Chinese migration, and the Cold War both at home and in the world.  Tang-Whitmore’s project argues that “authentic” Chinese food on U.S. plates, hand in hand with the crafted performances, delivered an intersectional formation of the “model minority myth” in the United States.  Utilizing an approach that skillfully combines interdisciplinarity with both public and private primary sources, it unearths a key means by which Chinese American anticommunism increased during a key period in U.S., international, and global history.  The award committee (Kate Burlingham—chair, Aaron Coy Moulton, and Marc Selverstone) was greatly impressed with Tang-Whitmore’s original approach and conceptual framework.  Her dissertation, once completed, will make an outstanding addition to the breadth of work at SHAFR.
 
Dante LaRiccia of Yale University received Honorable Mention for the Young Dissertation Completion Fellowship.  His dissertation--“Carbon Colonization: U.S. Empire in the Age of Oil”—explores the origins and evolution of the global oil economy and charts its role in advancing America’s interests and mission abroad.  It reveals how the processing, shipment, and consumption of oil—in addition to its extraction—facilitated the imperial ambitions of the United States.  He then traces the impact of those ambitions and their ensuing frictions—between and among American oil companies, U.S. policymakers, and local peoples, at both the elite and grassroots levels—framing those contestations against the backdrop of the Cold War.  Incorporating documents from over two dozen archives, LaRiccia’s work sits at the intersection of environmental, international, and energy history and offers a wide-ranging and creative account of the climate crisis and its imperial roots.  Its insights into both colonization and decolonization, realized through the lens of the global petroleum economy, provides a deeper understanding of both our geo-climatic era and the projection of U.S. power abroad.
 
Taylor Prescott of the University of Pennsylvania also received Honorable Mention for the Young Dissertation Completion Fellowship.  His dissertation—Sovereigns and Exiles, Recaptives and Revolutionaries: A History of Black Interethnic Exchange in Sierra Leone, 1775-1848—is a political, intellectual, and global history that links the American Revolution with the movement for independence in Sierra Leone.  By connecting the history of the United States with the global history of Sierra Leone, he argues that the importance of the American Revolution extends beyond its influence in the Euro-American world and reaches to those colonized in Africa.  His project is part of a growing literature that seeks to shed light on the important links between U.S. and African history during this early period.   Further, by calling for a “global history of Sierra Leone,” his project addresses the need to see Africans as global actors long before the anti-colonial movements of the late twentieth century.  The committee was impressed by Prescott’s project and excited about the much needed geographic and temporal diversity it brings to SHAFR.
 
The Stuart L. Bernath Scholarly Article Prize Committee—Mattias Fibiger (chair), Oli Charbonneau, and Kaete O’Connell—is pleased to announce that Ben Zdencanovic is this year’s winner.  “‘A Strange Paradox’: U.S. Global Economic Power and the British Welfare State, 1944–1951” in Diplomatic History is a pathbreaking contribution to U.S. foreign relations history.  With exceptional archival depth and analytic precision, Zdencanovic reinterprets the trans-Atlantic ecumene in the immediate postwar years.  He skillfully nuances the dominant “embedded liberalism” thesis, revealing profound tensions between American marketism and British statism in the elaboration of the postwar economic order.  Yet he also exposes, through a detailed study of tobacco duties, the deep interdependencies between the two projects.  For example, U.S. dollar aid financed British imports of American tobacco, and taxes on the consumption of this tobacco financed much of the incremental increase in government spending necessary to realize the Beveridge Plan. Elegantly written, empirically rich, and theoretically incisive, this is scholarship of the highest caliber.

Apply for the SHAFR-in-Asia Pacific Workshop 2026

Call for Applications

Call for Proposals to host the 2028 SHAFR Annual Conference

Every other year, SHAFR holds its annual meeting in a location other than the Washington, D.C., area. The SHAFR Council would like to hear from members interested in hosting the conference in late June 2028 and is especially interested in hearing proposals from people who would like to host the conference on their campus or at their institution with affordable meeting and housing facilities.  

SOCIETY FOR HISTORIANS OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS
1301 E. Main Street, Box 23
Murfreesboro, TN 37132
Email: [email protected]

Cate Dillon
White House Liaison
U.S. Department of State
[email protected]

Call for Papers
7th Annual Women in Baseball Virtual Conference
Women Beyond the Diamond
September 19-21, 2025

Topics can focus on ideas such as: announcers, owners, execs, writers, artists, architects and so much more. All topics and time periods related to women’s baseball are welcome.