Jeffrey Engel

Leading Presidential Historian of our time; Podcast host, The Past, The Promise, The Presidency; and Founding Director, SMU's Center for Presidential History

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Widely considered the leading presidential historian of his generation, Jeffrey Engel connects America’s past with our present, helping our nation find a way forward by bringing history to life with humor and insight.

Today’s problems are nothing new. The United States has faced wars, pandemics, and political division before. While history is an imperfect guide to enacting a better future, it’s the best guide we have. It’s also a guide both for, and full of, people. While others might focus on the dry and statistical view of the past, Engel goes inside the lives of the people on the ground who made history happen. From the White House to the front lines to the factory floor, he shares new revelations and insights, with humor to help us find a way forward by studying those who walked the same path before.

Jeffrey A. Engel is the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, Professor in the William P. Clements Department of History, and a Senior Fellow of the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies. Trained at Cornell University, Oxford University, and Yale University, he received his PhD in American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001. He has previously taught at Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Texas A&M University, where he was the Kruse ’52 Professor and received recognition for teaching at the college, university, and system levels. In 2019, SMU’s Resident Life Students named him their campus-wide Hope Professor of the Year.

Engel has authored and edited a total of thirteen books on American foreign policy and the American presidency, the latest including When the World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the End of the Cold War and the co-authored Impeachment: An American History. In 2025 Engel will be the Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Diplomatische Akademie Wien (Vienna School of International Studies).