Office Hours: By appointment

During the AY 23-24 Professor Michaela Hoenicke Moore will serve as Academic Director for the Academic Year Freiburg (AYF) program.

At the center of my research lie two broad themes addressing the cultural underpinnings of international relations and liberal democracy respectively. I am interested in the relationship between the political culture of the United States and its foreign policy, on the one hand, and in European responses to ‘America’ as a democracy and a world power on the other. My first book, Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), explored the political and intellectual context in which American popular and official conceptions of Nazi Germany were developed. It won the 2010 Myrna F. Bernath Book Award awarded by the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). 

Several years ago I began a project studying how German political journalists refashioned their private and political identities after 1945 and how they used America as a key concept in the political-intellectual transition from dictatorship to democracy. This project reflects my broader and enduring interest in transatlantic relations, convergence, and divergence. It also forms part of my larger exploration of the different European and American experiences in World War Two and the respective lessons drawn from the trauma of fascism, communism, war, and genocide.

Currently, I am working on a book that examines American foreign policy views at the grassroots level. Ordinary Americans participated in foreign policy debates to a much larger extent than previously recognized. Based on citizen letters, memoirs, and oral histories - from the Munich Crisis in 1938 through the fall of Saigon in 1975 - my study is the first to examine in-depth, and with a view to change over time, how citizens responded to their country’s global leadership and military interventions. 

By parsing domestic conflict over American military interventions from World War Two through Vietnam and by featuring arguments at the grassroots level, this work recasts our understanding of the dynamic relationship between American nationalism and internationalism. Broadening our conception of domestic controversies over war and international leadership, and re-integrating citizen voices, brings underexposed and unsettling questions about the nature of American democracy and its compatibility with military globalism into clearer focus. It reveals wider and deeper contestations over issues long debated by foreign policy experts: what purpose and whose interests does U.S. foreign policy serve?

I earned a PhD from the University of North Carolina in 1998. Before joining the department in 2008, I taught U.S. History at the Kennedy Institute of the Free University in Berlin and York University in Toronto, as well as transatlantic history as a DAAD visiting professor at the University of North Carolina. Between 1999 and 2001, I worked as a senior fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.

Teaching

I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of U.S. foreign policy, transnational history, international relations and history and theory.

• HIST:2151  The Global Cold War--Introducation to the History Major
• HIST:2151  The American Dream in International Perspective–Introduction to the History Major
• HIST:3143  International Politics: History of the Present
• HIST:3145  Europe and the U.S. in the 20th Century
• HIST:3995  Honors Research Seminar
• HIST:4125  War and Peace in the 20th Century
• HIST:4230  The Political Culture of American Foreign Policy
• HIST:4232  United States in World Affairs
• HIST:4236  Major Topics in U.S. Foreign Policy
• HIST:7246  The United States in the World (graduate reading seminar)
• Hist:7271 Transnational U.S. History–Theory and Practice (graduate research seminar)

Awards and service

• NEH Fellowship, AY 2022/23
• Academic Director for Academic Year Freiburg (AYF) 2021/22 [deferred due to medical leave]
• Arts & Humanities Initiative Grant (AHI) 2020/21
• Obermann Center Mellon-Funded Humanities for the Public Good, Advisory Board
• Fellow-in-Residence, Obermann Center, UI, Spring 2020
• Professional Development Award, UI, Spring 2020
• Learning Design Collaboratory & Community of Practice, UI, 2019-2020
• Travel Grant Committee, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, 2008-2015 & 2019-
• International Programs Travel Grant, UI, 2019, 2018, 2016, 2012, 2011, 2009
• Mid-Career Faculty Award, CLAS/History Dept, UI Spring 2018 
• Obama Fellow, Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, Mainz, Germany, Summer 2017
• Fulbright U.S. Scholar, Innsbruck, Austria, Spring 2017
• Harry S. Truman Library Institute Research Grant, 2016/17
• Director of Graduate Studies, 2014-2016
• Wye Faculty Seminar on Citizenship, Aspen Institute, Summer 2014
• Interdisciplinary Research Grant, Obermann Center, UI, Summer 2014
• Editorial Board, Diplomatic History, 2014-2016
• Fellow-in-Resident at UI Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, Fall 2013
• Career Development Award, UI, Fall 2013
• Curriculum Development Award, Int'l Programs, UI, 2013
• Honors Program Director, History, UI (2012-2014)
• Dean’s Scholar (2011-13), UI
• Editorial Advisory Board, University Press of Kentucky Book Series Studies in Conflict, Diplomacy, and Peace, 2012 –
• Myrna Bernath Book & Fellowship Awards Committee, SHAFR, 2010-2013
• Arts & Humanities Initiative Grant, UI (2010)
• Myrna Bernath Book Prize 2010, SHAFR
• Summer Research Fellowship, SIUE (2006)
• Management Committee, Transatlantic Studies Association (2008-11)
• J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship, AHA & LC (1999/2000)
• Foreign Policy Studies Fellowship, Brookings Institution (1992/93)
• German Marshall Fund of the U.S. Dissertation Grant (1992)
• International Federation of University Women Award (1992)
• Beeke-Levy Research Fellowship, Roosevelt Institute, NY (1991)
• German Historical Institute Dissertation Fellowship, Washington, DC (1991)
• Fulbright Student Scholarship (1987-89)

Publications

Books

• Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945

Articles