Rate My Professor Chris Nichols

Christopher McKnight Nichols is Professor of History and Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies at The Ohio State University, where he is affiliated with the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. He earned his PhD from the University of Virginia in May 2008 and also studied at Wesleyan University and Harvard College. Prior to joining Ohio State in 2022, Nichols served at Oregon State University from 2012 to 2022 in roles including Director of the Center for the Humanities and Sandy and Elva Sanders Eminent Professor in the Honors College. He previously held postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia.

Nichols specializes in the intellectual history of the United States’ role in the world, with particular focus on isolationism, internationalism, globalization, grand strategy, ideology, and the intersection of domestic and foreign policy from the nineteenth century to the present. He is the author or editor of six books, including Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age (Harvard University Press, 2011; revised paperback 2015), Rethinking American Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2021, co-edited with Elizabeth Borgwardt and Andrew Preston), and Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (Columbia University Press, 2022, co-edited with David Milne), which received the 2023 International Studies Association Joseph Fletcher Prize. Additional works include the Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2017; paperback 2022, co-edited with Nancy Unger) and the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History (2013). Nichols has received honors including an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2016 and serves as a frequent media commentator and organizer of academic conferences and public programs.