Professor Khalil specializes in U.S. foreign relations, modern Middle Eastern history, the Cold War, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in Middle Eastern history and international relations.

Khalil is the author of America’s Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State (Harvard University Press, 2016), which examines the influence of U.S. foreign policy on the origins and expansion of Middle East studies and expertise from World War I to the Global War on Terror. It was reviewed widely, including in the London Review of Books,��Al Ahram,��Publishers Weekly, the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence,��Commonweal, and was named by Foreign Affairs as a Best Book of 2017. He has also been a frequent media commentator and contributor, including for the Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Hill, Al Akhbar,�����Ի���Al Jazeera.

Professor McCormick teaches a range of courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including survey courses on colonial, modern, and contemporary Latin America, comparative revolutions, oral history methodologies, US-Mexico relations, and drugs and drug trafficking in Mexico.

She is the author of “The Last Door: Political Prisoners and the Use of Torture in Mexico’s Dirty War,” published in the journal The Americas, January 2017, and of the book The Logic of Compromise: Authoritarianism, Betrayal, and Revolution in Rural Mexico, 1935-1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). She is currently working on two book projects: one detailing the history of torture in Mexico since the 1970s and the other a co-authored overview of drug trafficking in Latin America.

Thompson was trained as a political historian, with a focus on the  nineteenth-century United States and, particularly, the Congress. Her first book, The “Spider Web”: Congress and Lobbying in the Age of Grant (Cornell University Press), reflects both her scholarly and hands-on experience, the latter as American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow.

Recently, Professor Thompson’s work has focused on the history of American Catholic nuns. She has written and lectured extensively on the subject, and has an 18-lecture audio series available through NowYouKnowMedia.com. Her research is from an explicitly feminist perspective, emphasizing the agency and social significance of sisters to American religious and secular history. As a result of this research, she has had the privilege of speaking internationally as well as across the U.S., and has served as a consultant to numerous documentarians and religious communities. Her forthcoming book,��The Yoke of Grace: American Nuns and Social Change, 1809-1917, is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Thompson received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.