Kelly J. Shannon

About

Kelly J. Shannon is the W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Shannon is associate professor of history at Florida Atlantic University, where she was previously the executive director of the Center for Peace, Justice, and Human Rights and the Chastain-Johnston Middle Eastern Studies Distinguished Professor in Peace Studies. She specializes in the twentieth-century history of US foreign relations, with a particular focus on the Islamic world, Iran, and women’s human rights.

She is the author of U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Shannon has also published book chapters and academic journal articles on President Harry Truman and the Middle East, the international movement to end female genital mutilation, the first Gulf War, and US relations with Iran, as well as state-of-the-field essays. She has spoken in many academic and public settings and has authored articles or been interviewed by the Washington Post,  NPR, The Atlantic, multiple podcasts, and other media outlets. Shannon is also a consultant for Women’s Learning Partnership, a transnational nongovernmental organization that promotes women’s leadership, civic engagement, and human rights; and is a member of the Atlantic Council's Iran Strategy Project Working Group.

Shannon is the recipient of many grants and honors, including the 2019 Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize, awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, one of the highest honors in the field of US foreign relations history. She is currently working on a book on US relations with Iran during the first half of the twentieth century, entitled The Ties That Bind: U.S.-Iran Relations, 1905–1953, which is under contract with Columbia University Press.