Dean's Faculty Fellow, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Snell Family Dean's Distinguished Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies and the School of Politics and Global Studies 

Ph.D., University of Kentucky, 1994
M.A., Texas Tech University, 1989
B.A., Angelo State University, 1987

Kyle Longley is the Snell Family Dean's Distinguished Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies and School of Politics and Global Studies. Longley joined the ASU faculty in 1995 after serving as a visiting professor at The Citadel. He has served in many administrative positions at ASU, including director of graduate studies for the history department and a Dean's Faculty Fellow.

Longley's research focuses on U.S. foreign relations and modern American politics. He has published five books on the topics of Costa Rica and the United States during the rise of José Figueres, the United States and Latin America, Senator Albert Gore Sr., Ronald Reagan and conservative mythology and the American combat soldier in Vietnam.  He also teaches courses on similar topics. For his efforts in the classroom, Longley has received several awards including the Zebulon Pearce Teaching Award for Outstanding Teacher in the Humanities and the Associated Students of Arizona State University Centennial Professor.

Kyle Longley has written four books, edited another and contributed numerous journal articles, encyclopedia entries and book reviews. His books include The Sparrow and the Hawk: Costa Rica and the United States during the Rise of José Figueres (University of Alabama Press, 1997) which received the A. B. Thomas Prize for the outstanding book published in Latin American Studies from the South Eastern Council on Latin American Studies. In 2002, Harlan Davidson published In the Eagle's Shadow: The United States and Latin America. A second edition is forthcoming in December 2008. In 2004, Louisiana State University Press released Senator Albert Gore, Sr.: Tennessee Maverick (foreword by Vice President Al Gore). One reviewer emphasized that "the book stands with [Dan] Carter's Politics of Rage as one of the best Southern political biographies to date." In January 2007, M.E. Sharpe published Deconstructing Reagan: Conservative Mythology and America's Fortieth President, a collection of essays that he edited and to which he contributed a chapter in addition to introduction and conclusion. His newest book is Grunts: The American Infantryman in Vietnam (August 2008), which distinguished historian Marilyn Young has characterized as a "sensitive account of the experience of American combat soldiers in Vietnam, from induction to discharge, which is a most timely reminder of the realities of war in a time of war. His canvas is vast and he peoples it vividly, from patriot to protestor and all the degrees in between."  The book has been selected for the Military History Book Club and is in its 4th reprint with a revised and expanded edition planned for 2012.

Right now, Dr. Longley is completing The Houses of the Purple Hearts: The Morenci 9, Small Town America and the Vietnam War (completion anticipated in December 2011), serving as associate editor of The Encyclopedia of United States-Latin American Relations (Congressional Quarterly Press in 2009), The Switzerland of the Americas:  A Concise History of Costa Rica (with Jason Colby, University of Victoria), and starting a project on foreign policy challenges facing the United States in the 21st Century with Admiral Jim Stavridis, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe.  In the future, he plans on working on a monograph on the suicide of Senator Lester Hunt in 1954.

Teaching Interests and Courses

Dr. Longley offers a wide variety of undergraduate courses. His most popular at the undergraduate level, both in the traditional form and on the Internet, include Modern U.S. Foreign Relations, the United States and Latin America, the American Experience in Vietnam and the American Cinema during the Cold War. Also, he has actively been involved in multidisciplinary courses including a team taught course with Dr. Del Kehl in English on American Literature and the Holocaust, as well as participating in the CLAS Learning Community where he has taught five semesters in the "War, Culture and Memory" cluster with colleagues from religious studies, political science and English.

He also has been an active participant in directing theses in the Honor's College and working with Sun Angel Undergraduate Research Award recipients.  At the graduate level, he offers courses in American history including The United States and the World, U.S.-Latin American Relations, Modern U.S. History since 1920 and new courses, The Social Constructions of Masculinity and Their Impact on U.S. Foreign Relations, and The New South in the Modern Era: Political, Social and Economic Changes in a Region in Flux. He has served on more than thirty Ph.D. and M.A. committees, directing more than a dozen, as well as working as a mentor to graduate students about pedagogy.

For his efforts, he has received recognition from different groups. These include the Zebulon Pearce Teaching Award for Outstanding Teacher in the Humanities and the Associated Students of Arizona State University that named him the Centennial Professor for outstanding teacher in 2002-2003. He also has received the Arizona State University Habitat for Humanity "Making the World a Cooler Place to Live" Teaching Award, the Preparing Future Faculty Program Mentor Appreciation Award and the Kappa Alpha Fraternity National Teacher of the Year Award.

In addition to research and teaching, Dr. Longley been very active in service-related duties at Arizona State University working as chair of the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee and the Personnel and Advisory Committee, the Graduate Admissions Committee and the Quality of Undergraduate Instruction Committee. He chaired the department's most recent Seven Year Review Committee, participated in a Department of Education grant for improving secondary history and worked as Director of Graduate Studies for two years, building on his chairing the History Department's Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate. He also has been active in the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, the Center for Latin American Studies and the Center for South East Asian Studies.

Many of these responsibilities have overlapped with larger university duties, a number related to his role as the Snell Family Dean's Distinguished Professor. These include working with our university president, Dr. Michael Crow, in the President Community Enrichment Program "Adventures in Learning" classes, a teaching and outreach service geared toward supporters of Arizona State University. Furthermore, he has been an active member of the Arizona Humanities Council as a member of the AHC Speaker's Bureau to focus on issues of inter-American relations and in particular, U.S.-Mexican relations, as well as veteran's issues, giving more than thirty presentations throughout Arizona to a wide variety of audiences. Other community participation efforts include the Phoenix Council on Foreign Relations and World Affairs Council.

On the national level, he has worked in a variety of leadership roles. These include organizing and hosting the Third Conference on Inter-American Relations in February 1999, which brought more than 100 distinguished scholars to our campus, and in April 2010, he hosted a conference, "Breaking Down the Walls," that brought together academics, diplomats, non-governmental actors, journalists and members of the military and intelligence communities that focused on the past, present and future of the United States in the world. He also has been active in the South Eastern Council on Latin American Studies, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Organization of America Historians, the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Society (PCB-AHA) and the Southern Historical Association, the latter two having served as a program committee member. In relation to OAH, he has been appointed to the Distinguished Lecturer Board for four years, and served on the Frederick Jackson Turner Book Prize Committee in 2006.  Also, he is president-elect of PCB-AHA.

He also has helped distribute information about U.S. foreign relations and politics on the national and international level, acting as a consultant or contributor to the Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, ABC News, Slate, Arizona Republic, Los Angeles Times, Austin American Statesman, the Associated Press, the Voice of America, JiJi Press, Jornal do Brazil and Shanghai Wenhui Daily.