Hannah Waits is a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard. Before joining Hist and Lit, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in US Foreign Policy at Dartmouth and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Global American Studies at the Harvard Charles Warren Center for American History. She is a specialist in politics, international NGOs, race, and religion in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. She earned her PhD in US History with a secondary field in Latin American History from UC Berkeley.
Among her writings on transnational politics are the articles “Putting an American God into Public Schools around the World: The Transnational History of a US Culture War” (Diplomatic History, 2022) and “Missionary Positions: How American Evangelicals Learned to Love Global AIDS Work, 1985-2005” (American Quarterly, 2024). For her research, she has earned fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Louisville Institute for the Study of American Religion.
She teaches courses on empire, humanitarianism, civil rights and social movements, and religion and politics. The main takeaway that she wants students to gain from her historical courses is the idea that taking a longer view allows us to wrestle with the pressing question “how did we get here?” and unpack the larger contexts, antecedents, and patterns that have shaped the present moment. She has won five awards for her teaching, including the John Clive Teaching Prize at Harvard.