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About Me

Lauren Turek is an associate professor of history at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, where she teaches courses on modern United States history, U.S. foreign relations, and public history. She is also the director of the Museum Studies minor and the director of the Mellon Initiative for Undergraduate Research in the Arts and the Humanities. She earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia. Her research centers on transnational religious networks and the influence of non-state religious actors on international politics, U.S. foreign policy, and domestic political culture. Turek’s articles on religion in American politics and foreign policy have appeared in Diplomatic History, the Journal of American Studies, and Religions, and her first book, To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelicals, Human Rights, and U.S. Foreign Relations, came out with Cornell University Press in 2020. She has received grant and fellowship support for her research from the Institute for Political History, the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, among others. She is currently at work on a new book about the history of U.S. foreign aid.

Recent Publications

Book Manuscript

To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelicals, Human Rights, and U.S. Foreign Relations (NY: Cornell University Press, 2020).

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

“Ambassadors for the Kingdom of God or for America? Christian Nationalism, the Christian Right, and the Contra War,” Religions 7, no. 12 (December 2016): 151 (1-16).

“To Support a ‘Brother in Christ’: Evangelical Groups and U.S.-Guatemalan Relations during the Ríos Montt Regime,”Diplomatic History 39, no. 4 (September 2015): 689-719.

“Religious Rhetoric and the Evolution of George W. Bush’s Political Philosophy,” Journal of American Studies 48, no. 4 (November 2014): 975-998.

Book Chapters

“Evangelical Empire: Christian Nationalism and U.S. Foreign Policy in a Post-Colonial World,” in Global Faith, Worldly Power, edited by Axel Schäfer, Melani McAlister, and John Corrigan (in development with the University of North Carolina Press).

“Earthquakes, Famines, and Hurricanes: Natural Disasters and Humanitarian Aid in Evangelical Missionary Strategy,” in Missionary Interests: Protestant and Mormon Missions in the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by David Golding and Christopher Cannon Jones (in development with Cornell University Press).

Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations, in Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations, edited by Tyson Reeder (forthcoming).

“Between Values and Action: Religious Rhetoric, Human Rights, and Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” in William Inboden, Jonathan Hunt, and Simon Miles, eds. The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming December 2021).

“Defending the Unreached and Unknown: American Evangelicals and International Religious Liberty,” in Ari Helo and Mikko Saikku, eds. An Unfamiliar America: Essays in American Studies (NY: Routledge, November 2020).

“Religious History Objects in Museums,” in Gretchen Buggeln, Crispin Paine, and S. Brent Plate, eds. Religion in Museums: Today and Tomorrow (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017).

Essays

“American Evangelicals in Guatemala,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, edited by William Beezley (forthcoming).

“‘Red’s Dream’ and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” in Voices & Visions (October 2018).

“An Outpouring of the Spirit: A Historiography of Recent works on Religion and U.S. Foreign Relations,” Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review 48, no. 2 (September 2017): 25-31.

“Building a Brighter Future,” Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review 46, no. 2 (September 2015): 28-29 (with Amanda Demmer).

“Race and Protestantism in America,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion in America, edited by John Corrigan and Edward Blum. Oxford University Press. (November 2017).

“Jackie Doll and the Pickled Peppers – When they Drop the Atomic Bomb,” in Voices & Visions (June 2017).

Media Coverage

Social Media

@laurenfturek

Country Focus

United States

Expertise by Geography

Central America, North America, United States

Expertise by Chronology

Modern, 20th century, 21st century

Expertise by Topic

American Presidents, Diplomacy, Genocide, Human Rights, Material Culture, Museums, Politics, Public History, Religion