Dr. Aileen Teague joined the Bush School’s Department of International Affairs as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2020. She previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Dr. Teague earned her PhD in history from Vanderbilt University in 2018. Born in Colon, Panama, she travelled the world as part of a military family and served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2006 to 2014. She teaches classes on American history and U.S. relations with Mexico and Latin America as well as thematic courses addressing issues such as interventionism, drug enforcement, national security, and addiction in U.S. society. Dr. Teague enjoys providing a voice on how history has shaped current social and political issues. Her opinion pieces have appeared in venues including Time and The Washington Post.
Dr. Teague’s research focuses broadly on issues of interventionism and militarization, incorporating top-down and bottom-up perspectives to understand the effects of U.S. policies on foreign societies. She is currently drafting a book manuscript based on her dissertation, Americanizing Mexican Drug Enforcement: The War on Drugs in Mexican Politics and Society, 1964–1982, which examines the effects of United States drug policies and policing efforts on 1970s and 1980s Mexican politics and society. The study incorporates a transnational approach, using archival sources from Mexico and the United States to explore the origins of bilateral drug enforcement measures and their relationship to Mexican state formation and U.S. domestic drug issues. The project also sheds new light on how local histories of political instability shaped the Mexican government’s response to the U.S. war on drugs. Dr. Teague’s work has been published in academic journals including Diplomatic History and the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. Her research has received support from organizations including Fulbright (García Robles), the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College, and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, where she served as a visiting fellow.
