Professor Ian Tyrrell

Professor Ian Tyrrell teaches the USSC postgraduate unit, American Exceptionalism. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, whose teaching and research interests include American history, environmental history, and historiography. Born in Brisbane, Queensland, he was educated at the University of Queensland and Duke University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar and James B. Duke Fellow.

Tyrrell was a pioneer in the approach to transnational history as a research program for reconceptualising United States history, through his essay “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History” in the American Historical Review in 1991. He is also the author of several books dealing with aspects of transnational history, including True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930 (University of California Press, 1999), Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, 2010).