The Society for Historians of American FOREIGN Relations Summer Institute | 2026
The 2026 SHAFR Summer Institute is a four-day-long program hosted by Ohio State University’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies and co-directed by Christopher McKnight Nichols (Ohio State) and Andrew Preston (University of Virginia). The Summer Institute will focus on the variety of US strategic cultures that emerged in response to previous moments of international crisis. At its most fundamental level, strategy applies all available means to achieve a desired end. Compared to most other states in the international system, the modern United States has possessed a much deeper pool of means in pursuit of far more expansive ends. The capaciousness of both means and ends has provided for a richly diverse array of American strategic cultures, some of which were lasting. Summer Institute participants will explore the ways in which previous generations of diplomats, strategists, economists, military planners, missionaries, activists, intellectuals, and others reconceived America’s place in the world and proposed to secure and bolster it. We hope to have as wide a chronological perspective as possible, from the colonial era to the present. How did the diplomatic, economic, military, demographic, technological, humanitarian, legal, ideological, and environmental challenges of the past shape U.S. strategic culture about world order, and about the future of the world itself? In the process, we will consider strategic cultures broadly, ranging across the ways in which history, political and social structures, and scores of other factors influence worldviews and thus the strategy-making processes of individuals, groups, and states. And we will tackle issues related to grand strategy. Ultimately, we also hope to offer some perspective on our current international condition and possible ways forward for the U.S. and the world.
