Jay Sexton

Jay Sexton

Role: President, SHAFR

Education: Ph.D., Worcester College, Oxford; B.A., University of Kansas

Email: [email protected]

Biography

Jay Sexton is the Rich and Nancy Kinder Professor of History and Director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. His research focuses on the nineteenth-century world. He currently serves as President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Sexton is the author or editor of seven books, and his current research examines the history of the Kansas–Missouri borderlands, tracing how this interior region shaped the development of the American state, the projection of U.S. power abroad, and the rise and challenges of the modern United States in the world.

Publications

  • A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (Basic Books, 2018)
  • The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (Hill and Wang, 2011)
  • Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837–1873 (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Awards & Honors

  • 2019 Stuart Bernath Lecture Prize
  • 2016 Distinguished Fellow, Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute
  • 2012 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library
  • 2000-2003 Marshall Scholar