Ian Tyrrell

Ian Tyrrell is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. His 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 an early 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 the author of several books dealing with aspects of transnational history, including Woman's World/Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective (University of North Carolina Press, 1991); 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); Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, 2010); and Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's America (Chicago, 2015). He is also an authority on American historiography, on which he has written Historians in Public (Chicago, 2005), and on the idea of American Exceptionalism. His most recent book is American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea (Chicago, 2022).