Jay Sexton

Biography

Jay Sexton is the Rich and Nancy Kinder Chair of Constitutional Democracy, Professor of History, and Director of the Kinder Institute at the University of Missouri. He is also currently serving as President of the Society of American Foreign Relations (2025–2026).

A native of Salina, Kansas, Sexton returned to the Midwest in 2016 after spending the better part of two decades at Oxford University. He began there as a Marshall Scholar and rose to become Director of the Rothermere American Institute (RAI). Upon his departure, he was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the RAI and an Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College.

Sexton specializes in the political and economic history of the nineteenth century, situating the United States within its international context, especially in relation to the British Empire. In A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (Basic Books, 2018), he argues that moments of transformative change in U.S. history have been shaped by international forces.

His other works include Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837–1873 (Oxford, 2005; 2nd ed. 2014) and The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (Hill and Wang, 2011). He has co-edited several collaborative volumes: The Global Lincoln (with Richard Carwardine), Empire’s Twin (with Ian Tyrrell), Crossing Empires (with Kristin Hoganson), and The Cambridge History of America in the World: Vol. 2 (also with Hoganson).

Sexton is currently at work on three projects: a book on how steam infrastructure shaped U.S. relations with the world in the second half of the nineteenth century; a new study of the Kansas–Missouri borderlands; and a collaborative volume (co-edited with Billy Coleman and Lily Santoro) offering global perspectives on the United States at its 250th anniversary.

Sexton enjoys working with enterprising students, undergraduate or graduate, who set their own intellectual agendas. When not reading or talking history, he cheers for Kansas City sports teams and keeps a close eye on British politics.