James Lockhart
About James Lockhart
I study American foreign relations, specializing in US-Latin American relations, particularly southern South America, during the Cold War.
The department has trained me to contextualize United States and Latin American history in a world-historical framework, to perceive the United States and Latin America in the world as well as the world in Latin America and the United States. This means appreciating America's place within centuries'-long, transnational patterns such as the Columbian Exchange, transatlantic slavery, and the Atlantic revolutions. This leads to increasingly larger-scale contexts, and I cultivate this big-picture thinking in my classrooms. In addition to American history, I teach several other survey and upper-division courses, and graduate seminars as well. I am currently preparing a project-based seminar treating the United States and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. See the following sample syllabi, with student evaluations attached:
I will defend my dissertation, "Reimagining Chile's Cold War Experience: From the Conflict's Origins to Salvador Allende's Inauguration," on Friday, 29 April 2016 at 2:00pm, before my committee, Professor Michael Schaller, Professor Jadwiga Pieper Mooney, Professor Fabio Lanza, and Professor Elizabeth Cobbs. I conducted archival research in the United States, Britain, and Chile. My research incorporates Chile into international Cold War history through the Atlantic paradigm rather than the US-centered, inter-American relations one. It begins with Chilean communists and anticommunists on the ground in Chile in the early-twentieth century, and not, as most histories do, with American interests and intervention in the country in the 1960s and 1970s. This broadens and deepens Chile's Cold War experience, contextualizes it within the history of the whole Cold War, and enables us to see the well-researched 1970s in a new light. It reveals Chile's early nuclear history for the first time as well. One of my dissertation's chapters, "Nuclear Foothold in Southern South America: Anglo-Chilean Relations, 1965-1970," which I presented at conferences in Britain and Belgium, will appear in Thomas Mills and Rory Miller, eds. Britain in the Back Yard: The United States and Great Britain in Latin America in the Twentieth Century, currently under review at Cambridge University Press, with an estimated publication date of late-2016 or early-2017.
