Christopher McKnight Nichols is Professor of History and Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, at The Ohio State University.

Nichols specializes in the history of the United States and its relationship to the rest of the world, particularly in the areas of isolationism, internationalism, and globalization, as well as the role of ideas and ideologies in U.S. foreign relations. He is also an expert on modern U.S. intellectual, political, and cultural history, from the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (1880-1920) through the present.

He is author or editor of six books.

**Just released! *Winner of the 2023 International Studies Association Joseph Fletcher Prize for Best Edited Book in Historical International Relations

Nichols' latest book, co-edited with David Milne, is Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (Columbia UP, August/Fall 2022) 

Published in 2021, Nichols co-conceived, co-edited, and co-authored, with Elizabeth Borgwardt and Andrew Preston, Rethinking American Grand Strategy (Oxford UP, 2021) 

Nichols' most well-known book is Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age (Harvard UP, 2011, revised paperback 2015).

Nichols was co-editor with Nancy Unger of the Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2017, new edition in paperback 2022)

Nichols was Senior Editor, with David Milne, and Editor-in-Chief Timothy Lynch, of the massive two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History (2013)

Nichols' first book was co-edited with Charles Mathewes, and entitled Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America’s Imminent Secularization from the Puritans to the Present Day (Oxford UP, 2008). 

Nichols is at work on a range of new projects. He is working on a study of the concept and practice of normalization in U.S. international relations from the Cold War to the present. Nichols is completing a book on the transformation of U.S. foreign relations in the early Cold War with a focus on the election of 1952 (in the Oxford University Press Pivotal Moments series), several research and writing efforts related to the history of ideas in U.S. foreign relations, several biographical studies, and a sweeping exploration of global anti-imperialism. Nichols has authored dozens of articles and essays published in both peer-reviewed journals and popular venues.

Nichols is a passionate advocate for the humanities and history. Nichols has done several hundred invited talks and conference presentations and has organized two major international history conferences and a range of smaller history and interdisciplinary conferences and seminars. He is a founding editorial board member of the “Made by History” section of the Washington Post.

Nichols is a frequent commentator on air, online, and in print on the historical dimensions of contemporary U.S. foreign policy and politics, most notably on C-SPAN and as a regular on NPR, OPB’s Think Out Loud with Dave Miller, and on the pages of the Washington Post. He has done on-stage and televised interviews with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kamau Bell, Madeleine Albright, Erik Larson, Annette Gordon-Reed, Heather Cox Richardson, Jon Meacham, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Fredrik Logevall, Nicholas Kristof, and Michael Beschloss, among others. He also has introduced and moderated hundreds of events in person, hybrid, and remote (panels, talks, discussions, community conversations, and more). Nichols is open to media and event inquiries (see personal professional website for examples and additional information).

From 2020-23 Nichols has done over 200 media interviews, talks, and events, reaching millions worldwide, drawing on insights from the 1918 influenza pandemic for confronting the COVID pandemic. He conceived, organized, co-edited, and co-wrote two major academic roundtable articles drawing on the history and insights of the 1918-19 flu in light of COVID and living in a new pandemic era. See Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Core (JGAPE 2020, 2022) *free access: "The 1918–19 Flu Pandemic in the Age of COVID."