About

Education

  • Ph.D., Ohio University
  • B.A., Saginaw Valley State University

Research Interests

  • U.S. in the World
  • U.S.-Latin American Relations
  • The Global Cold War

Courses Offered

  • The History of the United States to the Civil War
  • The History of the United States since the Civil War
  • History of American Foreign Relations
  • The United States and Vietnam
  • War and American Society
  • Latin America’s Cold War
  • Scandals in History and Literature
  • Culture Clashes and the Making of the Modern World
  • The World in the 20th Century

Selected Publications/Presentations

  • The United States and Latin America’s Cold War (under contract with Routledge)
  • “The Resurgence of the Right in Latin America: From the Cold War to Current Events.” Presented at the Northern Great Plains History Conference, Fargo, ND (September 2022)
  • The Dictator Dilemma: The United States and Paraguay in the Cold War (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)
  • “The United States and Alfredo Stroessner: A Cold War Story.” Presented at the Southeast Wisconsin Festival of Books, Waukesha, WI (November 2019)
  • “Who Speaks for Joelito? The United States, Paraguay, and Human Rights.” Presented at the Scholar Sip lecture series, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at Washington County, West Bend, WI (April 2019)
  • “‘A Slight but Salutary Case of the Jitters’: The Kennedy Administration and the Alliance for Progress in Paraguay,” Diplomacy & Statecraft vol. 22, no. 2 (June 2011): 300-320
  • “Cold War Crucible: The Berlin Wall and American Exceptionalism,” in Kimberly R. Moffitt and Duncan A. Campbell, eds., The 1980s: A Critical and Transitional Decade (Lexington Books, 2011), pp. 381-397
  • “The Paraguayan Connection: Drug Trafficking and Human Rights Diplomacy during the Nixon Administration.” Presented at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Falls Church, VA (June 2009)

Quote for Students

  • “The secret of life is then that this youthful spirit should never be lost. Out of the turbulence of youth should come this fine precipitate—a sane, strong, aggressive spirit of daring and doing. It must be a flexible, growing spirit, with a hospitality to new ideas, and a keen insight into new experience. To keep one’s reactions warm and true is to have found perpetual youth, and perpetual youth is salvation.” – Randolph Bourne, Youth (1913)