History Department News and Research

“The Iranians have indicated...that they are willing to have a deal. What they want are their rights to enrich uranium that are guaranteed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), that any country who signed on the the NPT has. But the Trump administration is insisting that there be no enrichment at all,” says Osamah Khalil, professor of history.

The death of El Mencho may trigger a much wider onslaught of violence, says Gladys McCormick, Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-U.S. Relations. “He was a key leader of one of the most violent criminal groups in Mexico. As with the captures or killings of other drug cartel kingpins, we are likely to see violence in response to the sudden power vacuum.”

The U.S. is placing tariffs on other countries for making successful products—not because they’re acting unfairly toward the U.S., says Andrew Wender Cohen, professor of history. “Imagine there's a country that's producing something very inexpensively that people make a lot of use out of. You're basically saying, ‘Well, we want to punish you for that.’”

The Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History recognizes outstanding scholarship and will be presented in Paris this spring. 

“Allport is a fluid writer, a conjurer with the rare ability to sustain a gripping narrative without resorting to Vaseline-lensed sentimentality. He overturns one piece of conventional wisdom after another—quarrelsome, occasionally, to a fault,” says New York Times reviewer Kevin Peraino.

Faculty experts will delve into a variety of topics from democracy and women’s voices to immigration in a series of weekly lectures offered in the Spring 2026 semester. 

“We're still not very close to phase two coming into place. Hamas is unlikely to disarm willingly and Israel is not going to be able to disarm them,” says Osamah Khalil, chair of the International Relations Undergraduate Program.

“Contrary to a lot of modern assumptions, it [the Maginot Line] was never expected to defeat a German attack by itself. The point of the Maginot Line was not to stop the boche in their tracks, but to channel any future westward offensive away from the French industrial heartland and toward the Low Countries, particularly Belgium,” writes Alan Allport, professor of history.

The article, co-authored by Associate Professor of History Robert Terrell and William Henry Johnson ’25 B.A. (Hist), was published in Central European History.

Alan Allport, professor of history, has written Advance Britannia: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945 (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2026). The book is a sequel to Allport’s 2020 work Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941 (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020).

“She [Vice President Delcy Rodriguez] strikes me as somebody who has known how to accommodate to Maduro, which is part of the reason why she’s there, but she doesn’t sort of strike me as somebody who would sort of step into that political vacuum and take control,” says Gladys McCormick, Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-U.S. Relations.

“There is no silly sensationalism in this book, merely sound storytelling and measured judgments. The author writes of ‘that particular German approach to war-making in the first half of the 20th century—tactical ingenuity in the service of strategic vacuity,’ writes Max Hastings, book critic for The Sunday Times.

“The presence of U.S. troops in Mexico will severely and irreparably undermine [President of Mexico] Sheinbaum’s counter-narcotics policies, which are netting results. Crippling the Sheinbaum administration will give rise to an even bigger and stronger enemy south of the border,” writes Gladys McCormick, Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-U.S. Relations.

“As a person who has lived on three continents and traveled extensively through three more, and as someone who has thought deeply about the implications of gospel values for both church and world, Leo is well aware that all that he says and does will be examined and parsed for their repercussions,” says Margaret Susan Thompson, professor of history and political science.

Osamah Khalil, professor of history and expert on the modern Middle East, says it’s untrue that Obama or Biden “held a personal animus toward Israel, especially Biden. Indeed, both administrations oversaw expansions in U.S. military assistance and coordination with Israel.”