Jeffrey A. Engel
Associate Director for Programming, Associate Professor
Jeffrey A. Engel is an Assistant Professor of history and public policy with Texas A&M University's Bush School of Government & Public Service, Evelyn and Ed F. Kruse '49 Faculty Fellow, and Interim Director of the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs. He holds a PhD in American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduated from Cornell University (Magna Cum Laude), and has studied at St. Catherine's College, Oxford University. Before coming to the Bush School, he was a lecturer in history and international relations at the University of Pennsylvania (2003-2004), a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College (2004), and an Olin Postdoctoral Fellow in International Security Studies at Yale University (2001-2003).
At the Bush School Engel teaches courses in American foreign policy and the evolution of international strategy, with primary research interests including diplomacy's domestic and localized effects, technology and foreign policy, and economic warfare. His Cold War at 30,000 Feet: the Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy was published by Harvard University Press in 2007, and he is editor of Local Consequences of the Global Cold War (Stanford University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008). He is also editing The China Diary of George H.W. Bush: The Making of a Global President (Princeton University Press, 2008), the private diary of former President George H.W. Bush while de-facto United States Ambassador to Beijing in the 1970s. Diplomatic History will run a special issue, edited by Engel, on the foreign policy of the first Bush administration, also to be published in 2008. He serves on the Editorial Board for Diplomatic History and the Journal of Transatlantic Studies, and has published in numerous journals including Diplomatic History, The International Journal, and Enterprise & Society. His next project, Seeking Monsters to Destroy: Language and War from Thomas Jefferson to George W. Bush (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) is a history of the personification effect: how the American tendency to personify international conflicts alters policy options.