Matthew K. Shannon

Associate Professor of History History

Matthew Shannon is a historian of the United States and the world. He focuses on U.S.-Iran relations, with research interests in the history of diplomacy, education and student movements, development and human rights, and religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At Emory & Henry, Dr. Shannon teaches in the History Department and directs CORE 300, the international seminar in the E&H Core Curriculum. 

Education

  • Temple University
    Ph.D., History
  • University of North Carolina Wilmington
    M.A., B.A., History

Research

Shannon’s most recent book, Mission Manifest: American Evangelicals and Iran in the Twentieth Century, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press, as part of its United States in the World Series, in 2024. 

He is the author of Losing Hearts and Minds: American-Iranian Relations and International Education during the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2017), translated into Persian and published by Parseh Press in 2023.

Shannon is the editor of American-Iranian Dialogues: From Constitution to White Revolution, c. 1890s-1960s (Bloomsbury, New Approaches to International History, 2021) and coeditor (with Mark Finney) of 9/11 and the Academy: Responses in the Liberal Arts and the 21st Century World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 

Original research articles are in Diplomatic History, Passport, International History Review, Iranian Studies, The Sixties, and The Journal of Civil and Human Rights. He has written widely about the historiography of U.S.-Iran relations, including in Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations and Brill’s Christian-Muslim Relations.

He is also the Principal Investigator of the Community School Oral History Project, in partnership with the Presbyterian Historical Society.

Contact Info

144 McGlothlin-Street Hall

Emory, VA 24327

276-944-6179