Dear Colleagues,

 

We hope you are all doing well as the semester winds down and the much-needed holiday season approaches. Below are some recent updates from the desk of Christopher McKnight Nichols, the Hayes Chair in National Security Studies at The Ohio State’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies.

 

It was a successful start to the second year of the International History Seminar, co-hosted by the Mershon Center and Ohio State’s History Department, and co-chaired by Professor Nichols and Joe Parrott. Autumn’s programming included a book launch by Ohio State’s Lydia Walker, and presentations by Indiana University’s Michael DeGroot on communist international economic visions and by the University of Glasgow’s Jay Sarkar on uranium and decolonization. 

 

November marked the culmination of a major collaborative effort between Getty Images, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, and the History Departments at The Ohio State and Miami Universities with the publication of Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories That Changed the World, a the groundbreaking collection of photographs and essays, which shed new light on the history of Black America.

 

Thanks to a generous grant from the Stanton Foundation, Professor Nichols and the Mershon Center hosted a symposium on “The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime: Global Perspectives” at Ohio State. An international, multidisciplinary group of specialists assembled to assess the impact of twenty-first-century challenges on treaties and security institutions shaped for the previous century’s risks. Recordings of the two panels can be found on the Mershon Center YouTube channel.

 

Funding from the Stanton Foundation will also support a major new conference and book project, co-directed by Professor Nichols and Professor Andrew Preston, and focused on new approaches to American grand strategy. Contributors will engage questions not often historicized and understood in grand strategic terms, such as artificial intelligence, crypto-currency, and climate change, as well as strategically critical regions (like Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and the Arctic) and geographies (such as the seas and outer space).

 

Professor Nichols's recent efforts to provide historically-focused public commentary included an appearance on the CNN documentary “America First” and an American History Hit podcast episode on the Spanish-American War.

 

With all best wishes for a productive end to the semester,

 

Hayes Chair Graduate Research Associate to Christopher McKnight Nichols, Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies 

Mershon Center for International Security Studies 

The Ohio State University