Curriculum Vitae:

Research Interests

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 currently writing a book on the history of American nation building in the postcolonial world from the Cold War through the present.  He is also interested in the international history of human rights and humanitarian affairs, and is planning a future project on America and the campaign against world hunger.

Michael Latham is the author of Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2000). He is also a co-editor of two volumes:  Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); and Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective (Routledge, 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.

Professor 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.

He lives in Somers, New York, with his wife Jennifer and their two daughters, Maile and Anya.