My name is Zachary Conn. Most people call me Zach. I am a historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America living in Dallas, Texas, where I am a Lecturer at the University of Texas-Dallas and a Senior Fellow at the SMU Center for Presidential History. I’m interested in the ways big picture histories of international relations, politics, political thought, and constitutionalism shape, and are shaped by, individual human lives and relationships. Federal Indian Agents of the Early United States, my in-progress monograph on the early republic’s ambassadors to Native American nations, is under advance contract with Columbia University Press’s Global America series. My scholarly writing has appeared in Diplomatic History, History and Theory and Intelligence and National Security. I am also an active public historian. Right now, I’m working on a narrative history podcast series exploring the origins of American foreign relations through close readings of entries from The Diary of John Quincy Adams. I got my start in Early American History at the College of the University of Chicago, where I earned a BA in 2012, and at Yale University, where I received a PhD in December 2022. I recently held postdoctoral research fellowships at the SMU Center for Presidential History and the University of Idaho. In addition to Idaho, Yale, and UTD, I have taught at the University of New Haven, Albertus Magnus College, and a private high school on Long Island. Please feel free to email me (zconn@smu.edu) to discuss research, teaching, the ups and downs of the academic life, or how to survive a two-week bus tour of the American Southwest with 24 ninth graders.
