Matthew Shannon is a historian of the United States and the world. He is the author or editor of four books, including two monographs with Cornell University Press that explore the roles of Iranian students in the United States (Losing Hearts and Minds, 2017) and American missionaries in Iran (Mission Manifest, 2024) in shaping US-Iran relations before 1979. Together, these books provide a human dimension to the history of U.S.-Iran relations and offer new perspectives on international education, evangelical religion, and transnational mobility.

Shannon’s research articles have been published in Diplomatic History, International History Review, Iranian Studies, The Sixties, and the Journal of Civil and Human Rights. He has also contributed to Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations and Brill’s Christian-Muslim Relations. He is the Principal Investigator of the Community School Oral History Project, a digital humanities initiative dedicated to documenting the experiences of students who attended the Community School of Tehran from the 1930s through the 1970s.

Shannon earned his PhD in history from Temple University in Philadelphia. Before joining AUC, he worked for more than a decade at Emory and Henry University, a liberal arts college in the Appalachian Mountains of Southwest Virginia. At AUC, he teaches American history in domestic and global contexts, along with courses on American studies and US-Middle East relations. His teaching is rooted in the global liberal arts tradition, and he is an active member of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.