Christopher McKnight Nichols is Professor of History and Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies, at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, at The Ohio State University. Nichols is a former Andrew Carnegie Fellow and an Organization of American Historians (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer. He specializes in the history of the U.S.'s role in the world, including American intellectual, cultural, political, and foreign policy history from the Gilded Age and Progressive Era through the twentieth century, with a focus on ideas and ideologies, including isolationism, internationalism, and globalization. Dr. Nichols is author, co-author, or editor of six books. Nichols' latest book, co-edited with David Milne, is Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (Columbia University Press, 2022), was awarded the International Studies Assocation's 2023 Fletcher Best Book Award. Nichols co-edited, co-authored with Elizabeth Borgwardt and Andrew Preston is Rethinking American Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2021). Nichols is most well-known for authoring Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age (Harvard University Press, 2011; paperback, 2015). Nichols co-edited, with Nancy Unger, the Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Wiley Blackwell, 2017, new paperback 2022); Nichols co-edited and co-authored, with Charles Mathewes, Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America's Imminent Secularization from the Puritans to the Present Day (Oxford University Press, 2008). Nichols was Senior Editor, with David Milne, and editor-in-chief Timothy Lynch, of the two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History (Oxford University Press, 2013). Other books projects in the works include a study of early Cold War foreign policy, the Northwest Ordinance, grand strategy, a biography, and a sweeping global account of anti-imperialism.
Nichols is a frequent commentator on television, radio, online, and in print on U.S. politics and foreign policy -- on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and in the pages of the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angles Times, TIME Magazine (where he is on the editorial board of the "Made by History" section), among others. Nichols is founding co-editor of the InterConnections international history book series at the University of North Carolina Press.
Nichols studied at Harvard College, Wesleyan University, and the University of Virginia, where he received his M.A. and Ph.D. in History. Before coming to Ohio State, Nichols was Director of the Oregon State University Center for the Humanities, Associate Professor of History, and Sandy and Elva Sanders Eminent Professor in the Honors College, and founder and director of OSU's Citizenship and Crisis Initiative. Before that Nichols was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in U.S. History at the University of Pennsylvania. Among other teaching honors, Nichols was honored as the Oregon State University Honors College Professor of the Year in 2014.
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