Zachary Conn

Dr. Zachary Conn is a historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America based in Dallas, Texas, where he is a Lecturer in History at the University of Texas at Dallas and a Senior Fellow at the SMU Center for Presidential History. He is interested in the ways big-picture histories of international relations, politics, political thought, and constitutionalism shape, and are shaped by, individual human lives and relationships.

Conn’s first monograph, Federal Indian Agents of the Early United States: A Diplomatic, Political, and Intellectual History, is under advance contract with Columbia University Press and set to be published in 2028. Based upon Conn’s 2022 Yale University doctoral dissertation, the book will be the first modern historical study of the early republic’s corps of ambassadors to Native American nations, known as Indian agents, and a significant contribution to a new historiographical school arguing for the importance of Indigenous polities to early US foreign policy. The role of agent was more complex, diverse, and significant than historians have previously recognized; in addition to serving as diplomats, these officials were also civil servants, politicians, and local patriarchs, particularly in the numerous cases where agents married Indigenous women. The United States’ complex interactions with Indigenous nations as transacted by Indian agents constituted their own form of international relations and impacted foreign policy as traditionally understood, including Anglo-American relations, Spanish-American relations, and, eventually, dealings between the Union and the independent Republic of Texas.

Early findings Federal Indian Agents of the Early United States appeared in Summer 2026 in Diplomatic History’s forum marking the 250th anniversary of US independence. Conn’s contribution, “Creating the ‘Great American Father’: Indigenous Sovereignty, Republican Monarchy, and the International Consequences of the American Revolution,” argues the birth of the American presidency enabled the early United States to develop patterns of interaction with Native nations that were as monarchical as they were republican. Support for Conn’s research has come from the SMU Center for Presidential History and the University of Idaho, where he held postdoctoral research fellowships, along with such institutions as the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University.

Conn is also passionate about sharing his knowledge of and enthusiasm for history with non-specialist audiences, especially students. Before working at UT-Dallas, he taught at the University of Idaho, Albertus Magnus College, the University of New Haven, and Yale. While finishing his PhD, he spent two memorable years teaching Grade 10 World History and Advanced US Government and Politics at an independent school in East Hampton, New York, where his additional responsibilities included designing a two-week travel course on Indigenous pasts and presents in the American Southwest and living with two colleagues and fifteen international students in an off-campus boarding house. Conn’s pedagogy deemphasizes lecturing in favor of an inquiry-driven approach in which the instructor’s job is to facilitate collaborative close readings of arresting primary documents. Some of his ideas about the teaching of history appeared in the December 2024 History and Theory essay “A House with Exposed Beams: Inquiry-Based Learning and Historians’ Ethical Responsibilities as Scholar-Teachers.” Conn is also excited to explore early American history with a public audience via his in-progress narrative history podcast series, “The World According to Quincy,” which will tell the story of early US foreign relations through close readings of entries from the Diary of John Quincy Adams.