Rate My Professor Jay Sexton

Jay Sexton is the Rich and Nancy Kinder Chair of Constitutional Democracy, Professor of History, and Director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. A native of Salina, Kansas, Sexton returned to the Midwest in 2016 after nearly two decades at Oxford University in England. There, he began as a graduate student on a Marshall Scholarship, advanced to Director of the Rothermere American Institute, and upon departure was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the institute and an Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College. He continues to bring University of Missouri students to Oxford for Atlantic history study abroad programs each March and July.

Sexton specializes in the political and economic history of the nineteenth century, situating the United States in its international context, particularly in relation to the British Empire. His prominent publications include the monograph A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (Basic Books, 2018); Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837-1873 (Oxford University Press, 2005; second edition, 2014); and The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (Hill and Wang, 2011). He has also co-edited key volumes such as The Global Lincoln with Richard Carwardine (Oxford University Press, 2011); Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-Imperialism from the Founding to the Age of Terrorism with Ian Tyrrell (Cornell University Press, 2015); Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain with Kristin Hoganson (Duke University Press, 2020); and The Cambridge History of America and the World, Volume 2: 1820-1900, with Kristin Hoganson (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Currently, he is writing a book on how steam infrastructure conditioned connections between the United States and the wider world during the second half of the nineteenth century. Sexton received the 2024 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award. As director of the Kinder Institute, he oversees initiatives that advance scholarship and teaching in the global history of constitutional democracy, supporting faculty research, student fellowships, and public engagement.