Dr Halbert Jones

halbert jones
LAC Affiliate Member

I joined the Latin American Centre in 2011, when I arrived at St Antony’s College to lead its North American Studies Programme, an initiative to explore the connections between the states and societies of the North American region, broadly defined as extending from the Arctic to Central America and the Caribbean.  In 2016, I became director of the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford’s centre for the study of the history, politics, and literature of the United States.

 

I am an historian by training, and my research interests include the history of US foreign policy towards Latin America, the political development of Mexico in the twentieth century, and the international relations of North America.  In my book, The War Has Brought Peace to Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2014), I assess the impact of World War II on Mexico, highlighting the importance of international conditions to the process of political consolidation that was under way there in the early 1940s.  I am currently doing further work on Mexican politics and on US-Mexican relations during the Cold War.  I teach an optional paper at the Latin American Centre on “Mexico, North America, and the World,” which seeks to place modern Mexican history in regional and global context.

 

I am a native of North Carolina, and I completed my undergraduate and graduate studies at Harvard University, where most recently I served as the senior fellow responsible for the Mexico and Central America Program at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.  In between my stints in Cambridge (Massachusetts, not the other place), I worked in Costa Rica as a speechwriter for Nobel laureate Oscar Arias, in Washington (DC) as an historian for the US State Department, and in Mexico City as a visiting fellow at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México’s Centre for Inter-American Programmes and Studies.

Publications

  • Governing the North American Arctic: Sovereignty, Security, and Institutions

    Berry, DA, Bowles, N, Jones, H
    2016
    |
    Book
    At this moment of rapid change, this book seeks to explore how the challenges of governance are developing and being met in the North American Arctic, while also drawing upon lessons from the history of governance in the region.
    Political Science

  • Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976: Documents on South America, 1973-1976; Volume E-11, Part 2

    Berndt, S, Jones, H, Siekmeier, JF, Howard, AM
    2015
    |
    Book
    This volume is part of a Foreign Relations subseries that documents the most important issues in the foreign policy of Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.
    Argentina

  • Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976: Documents on Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, 1973-1976; Volume E-11, Part 1

    Jones, H
    2015
    |
    Book
    This volume is part of a Foreign Relations subseries that documents the most important issues in the foreign policy of Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.

  • The War Has Brought Peace to Mexico: World War II and the Consolidation of the Post-Revolutionary State

    Jones, H
    2014
    |
    Book
    Although the battlefields of World War II lay thousands of miles from Mexican shores, the conflict had a significant influence on the country's political development. Though the war years in Mexico have attracted less attention than other periods, this book shows how the crisis atmosphere of the early 1940s played an important part in the consolidation of the post-revolutionary regime. Through its management of Mexico's role in the war, including the sensitive question of military participation, the administration of Manuel Avila Camacho was able to insist upon a policy of national unity, bringing together disparate factions and making open opposition to the government difficult. World War II also made possible a reshaping of the country's foreign relations, allowing Mexico to repair ties that had been strained in the 1930s and to claim a leading place among Latin American nations in the postwar world. The period was also marked by an unprecedented degree of cooperation with the United States in support of the Allied cause, culminating in the deployment of a Mexican fighter squadron in the Pacific, a symbolic direct contribution to the war effort.
    History
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