Christopher Dietrich

Christopher Dietrich

Assistant Professor of History
Email: [email protected]
Office: Dealy Hall 617
Phone: 718-817-3925

Christopher Dietrich has been named one of five Nancy Weiss Malkiel Junior Faculty Fellows for 2016 at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The Malkiel Fellowship recognizes an emerging class of faculty leaders who are poised to play a significant role in shaping American higher education. For more details, see the website at woodrow.org/news/nancy-weiss-malkiel-junior-faculty-fellows-announced/.

  • The University of Texas at Austin, PhD in History, August 2012

    The University of Texas at Austin, MA in History, May 2008

    Grinnell College, BA in History and English, May 2001

  • Chris Dietrich's research and writing emphasize U.S. diplomatic history, the history of twentieth century American political thought, and the history of international politics.  He finds particular interest in the relationship between ideas and power on global, national, and local scales.

    Dr. Dietrich's first book, near completion, is about a hitherto unexplored group of Western-educated anti-colonial elites in Latin America and the Middle East who sought to use the momentum of decolonization, the rise of international law, and the shifting economic currents of the global oil market to overturn the power dynamic in the oil industry from the 1950s to the 1970s.  He is working on two other books: one on world oil and U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century and another on the rise and fall of United Nations peacekeeping operations under Ralph Bunche.  He is also the editor of the forthcoming three-volume American Companion to the History of U.S. Foreign Relations, 1776 to the Present, from Wiley-Blackwell.

    His research and writing have been supported by fellowships from the American Historical Association, the National History Center and the Mellon Foundation, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, as well as by Fordham University, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and the University of Texas at Austin.  A former Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic, Dr. Dietrich was also a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar to Mexico and in 2015 he was selected as the Sherman Emerging Scholar by the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. He also chairs the Columbia University Seminar on Twentieth Century Politics and Society.

    Dr. Dietrich has also published book chapters in edited volumes on globalization, the war on terror, the 1970s energy crisis, and genocide, as well as articles on southern Africa, international history, anti-colonialism, oil, the Middle East, and U.S. foreign relations in the academic journals Diplomacy & Statecraft, The International History Review, Itinerario, Humanity, and Diplomatic History.  He has provided commentary on U.S. foreign relations in public outlets like Passport, Perspectives, Informed Comment, CNN Global Public Square, and CounterPunch.

  • Undergraduate:

    HIST 1100 - Understanding Historical Change: American History

    HIST 3560 - Global History of the Cold War

    HIST 3842 - The Vietnam Wars

    HIST 3852 - 20th Century United States Radicalism

    HIST 3855 - American Foreign Policy Since 1898

    HIST 3857 - America Since 1945

    HIST 4009 - Film, Fiction and Power in the American Century

    Graduate:

    HIST 6724 - American Thought and Politics, 1877 - Present

  • Christopher Dietrich's Curriculum Vitae