Michael Latham

Michael Latham’s research centers on the history of U.S. foreign relations, twentieth-century America, and the global history of the Cold War. He is especially interested in the way that American policymakers, social scientists, and opinion leaders have explored problems of international development and modernization. He is also interested in the international history of human rights and humanitarian affairs.

Michael Latham teaches a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in twentieth-century American history and the history of U.S. foreign relations. During the 2000-2001 academic year he taught in China at the Nanjing University-Johns Hopkins University Center for Chinese and American Studies. In 2007 he received Fordham University’s award for undergraduate teaching in the social sciences.

Professor Latham is the author of The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (2011) and Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (2000). He is also a co-editor of two volumes:  Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (2003); and Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective (1996).   His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, Third World Quarterly, Peace and Change, and several edited volumes. In 1998, he received the Bernath Scholarly Article Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.