ABOUT

I am an associate professor of history at Carleton University in Ottawa. I've been teaching at Carleton since 2006, after seven years at the University of Western Ontario and six at the University of New Brunswick. I principally teach in two overlapping fields: the history of the United States and international history in the 19th and 20th centuries.

 

In a general sense, I am a historian of modern American foreign relations, although the label itself is limiting. Having studied and written on NATO nuclear strategy in the 1950s, I came to the not entirely surprising conclusion that much of what I had been doing as a diplomatic historian was barely scraping the surface. Diplomatic history has a reputation of being one of the most methodologically conventional subfields of history (a reputation that is, fortunately, starting to change). My own turn away from what might be described as a naive empiricism/Realism began with my exposure to friends and colleagues (especially at Yale and the University of New Brunswick) who were far smarter and more theoretically ecumenical. Taking the international system as my field, I had to start asking much harder questions about culture, identity, language, socialization, interaction and so forth, not to mention to acquire a more overtly reflexive understanding of my own method. 

 

Understanding how states act on behalf of their nominal people involves, at the very least, an understanding of how such peoples are grouped, clustered and constituted historically as an identity, and how that sense of identity is postulated against a world of other identities. I was impressed by George Herbert Mead’s microsociological studies of the self (which he expanded into macrosociologcal accounts of society, and even the international system) and am thus inclined toward a broadly social understanding of state interaction, which involves trying to look at the evolution of those agents who represent the state and those—capital, religion, culture, ideas—that often transcend it. All of this is to say, that I am deeply interested not only in history, but in international relations theory, as well social and cultural theory, gender, race, imperialism, post-colonialism, the history and practice of Pragmatism, among others. I also teach U.S. cultural, intellectual, and environmental history.

 

I took my BA in modern history at the University of Toronto, focusing on Europe and the United States. I followed that with an MA in U.S. history at Yale University, where my advisor was Steve Gillon and one of my teachers was Paul Kennedy. As my interests moved toward international history, under Kennedy's unintended influence, I decided to pursue a second MA (technically called an M.Phil.) in International Studies at Cambridge University. My supervisor there was Ian Clark, a scholar whose extraordinary output transversed international relations theory and history. I decided to stay on and complete a Ph.D. under his patient guidance. I defended in the spring of 1996, with Philip Towle and Lawrence Freedman as my Viva examiners. It took me many more years to convert my rudimentary thesis about an arcane aspect of early NATO strategic thinking into a book that made much better use of the cultural and sociological turn in international relations.

 

My current research examines the crisis that afflicted the North Atlantic world’s industrial-imperial societies at the beginning of the 20th century. The project began as a study of American progressive liberal internationalism before the First World War but has expanded into a comprehensive history of the diplomatic, economic, social, intellectual, and transnational filaments that crossed the North Atlantic in the generation before and during the war. It aims to understand how different nation-states responded to the internal fissures induced by the rise of industrial labour, women’s activism, and new voices of colonial/imperial resistance—in short, calls for an expansion of the concept of humanity, self-determination, and human rights that destabilized the existing social order. The responses of these imperial states pointed, ultimately, toward the catastrophic war of 1914, but also past it, toward a world of liberal-capitalist governance through new institutional networks. In the short term, I am writing a history of the 1919 Zurich Congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom as a way of understanding how anti-national, dissenting organizations reassembled after the war and advanced a more radical critique of the intersection of national polities and international relations. The Zurich Congress articulated the idea that domestic human rights—sexual, economic, racial—were the only legitimate bases for a new international order. In this claim, they developed (often) uneasy ties with socialist and colonial agents as well. But the argument that, collectively, these groups advanced a new ontology of international relations rooted more explicitly in concepts of human equality can be traced in part to this struggle against war.