Sheyda Jahanbani

Sheyda Jahanbani is a scholar of US foreign relations and global and international history in the 20th century. Her work explores the emergence of “global” thinking in the decades after World War II, the impacts of the global Cold War on US politics, society, and culture, and the intersection of domestic and foreign politics and policymaking.

Professor Jahanbani first book, The Poverty of the World: Rediscovering the Poor at Home and Abroad, 1941-1968 (Oxford University Press, 2023) brings together the histories of US foreign relations and domestic politics to explain why, during a period of unprecedented affluence, Americans rediscovered poverty as an explicitly global problem and supported a major policy initiative to combat it. Revisiting a moment of triumph for American liberals in the 1940s, Jahanbani shows how the US's newfound role as a global superpower prompted novel ideas among liberal thinkers about how to address poverty and generated new urgency for trying to do so. A revisionist interpretation of postwar US history, the book sheds new light on the domestic impacts of the Cold War, the global ambitions of American liberalism, and the way in which key intellectuals and policymakers worked to develop an alternative vision of US empire in the decades after World War II.

The Poverty of the World received the Vice Chancellor for Book Research Publication Award from the Hall Center for the Humanities, the Merle Curti Prize in Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians, the Center for Presidential History’s Distinguished Book Award, and the Stuart L. Bernath Prize for Best First Book from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Professor Jahanbani is currently writing a history of “global citizenship” during the Cold War as well as working on a digital history project to capture the experiences of US international development and nation-building endeavors in the decades after 1968.

She received her B.S.F.S. in International Politics from the Edmund G. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Brown University. Her research has been supported by the Charles Warren Center for American History at Harvard University, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and the Hall Center among others.

Professor Jahanbani teaches a variety of classes for both undergraduate and graduate students at KU including courses in global history, modern US history, and historical methods. For her innovative and effective teaching, she has received both the Chancellor’s Silver Anniversary Teaching Award (2009) and the William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence (2023). In the Fall of 2024, she was selected as a Faculty Fellow at the KU Center for Teaching Excellence, where she will continue to develop strategies for deepening student engagement and belonging.

In addition to her pursuits as a scholar, Professor Jahanbani is also interested in national politics and contemporary policy issues. She served as an intern to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education & Welfare and the Office of Public Affairs, National Security Council, Office of the President. She also worked as an organizer for the United Auto Workers in their campaign to advocate for academic workers, particularly non-tenured faculty and graduate teaching assistants at public and private universities across the country. She is a proud member of the United Academics of KU.

For more on her research and teaching, see professorsheyda.com or follow her on Instagram @professorsheyda