People

Kyle Burke

Assistant Professor

CONTACT Information and CV

Office: SOC 265
Email: burke3@usf.edu
Curriculum Vitae

EDUCATION

PhD, Northwestern University, 2016

TEACHING

Reflecting my broad training and research interests, I offer classes across the spectrum of modern US and global history. I am especially keen to explore the United States' shifting relationship to the world through courses such as the Global Cold War, American Empire, the Vietnam War, and the History of US Foreign Relations. I am also fascinated by the intertwined histories of economic development and ecological change, a topic my students and I explore in my survey Global History since 1750, which examines the massive historical shifts unleashed by the fossil-fuel age. 

Beyond the classroom, I enjoy advising student research. Over the years, my students have explored a wide array of topics such as US peacemaking efforts during the Cold War, arms trafficking, post-industrial pollution, and the processed chicken industry. I am eager to advise graduate students working in modern US and global history. 

RESEARCH

My scholarship examines the interwoven histories of war, political violence, and radicalism in the United States and the wider world. My first book, Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War, was published by University of North Carolina Press in June 2018. Utilizing previously untapped sources from four continents, it chronicles the rise and fall of an international network of right-wing organizations that supported anticommunist guerrillas in the global south from the 1950s through the 1980s. My articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in Diplomatic History, The Times Literary Supplement, Jacobin, The American Historical Review, The Pacific Historical Review, Terrorism and Political Violence, H-War, and H-Diplo.

I am currently at work on a new book tentatively titled White Power Worldwide. It explores the creation and mobilization of a trans-Atlantic white supremacist movement since 1945. Tacking between the United States and Europe, it shows how white power activists raised money, circulated texts, narratives, and ideas, and targeted common enemies through similar modes of violence. A chapter that surveys this story was published in Global White Nationalism: From Apartheid to Trump from Manchester University Press.

My research and writing has been supported by fellowships from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Temple University's Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, New York University's Tamiment Library, and Northwestern University's Chabraja Center for Historical Studies and the Buffett Institute for Global Studies.