Contributor Profiles

Jeremy Kuzmarov is J.P. Walker assistant professor of history at the University of Tulsa. He grew up in Montreal and attended Dawson College, (DEC 1998) McGill University (BA 2001; MA 2002) and then completed his doctoral degree in history at Brandeis University in 2006.

Jeremy took a course at McGill on crime and punishment that influenced the writing of his dissertation, The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs, which was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2009. The book looks at how politicians and the media exaggerated the scope of the drug crisis in Vietnam and helped to fuel the growth of the war on drugs.

 His second book, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Massachusetts Press, 2012), provides the first comprehensive history of U.S. clandestine policing operations, drawing on declassified government records.  The concluding chapter shows the continuity between clandestine policing during the Cold War and the war on terror, including the link to large-scale human rights abuses.

Focus on the Third World

Kuzmarov’s scholarly research has focused on the intersection between U.S. criminal justice and foreign policy, critically examining Western intervention in Third World nations. He contributed an article on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan to the book, Hearts and Minds: A People’s History of Counterinsurgency, edited by Hannah Gurman.

His next major research project aims to investigate Western political interference in sub-Saharan Africa after 1960. His career has been influenced by authors such as Noam Chomsky, Alfred W. McCoy, Jerry Lembcke and Peter Dale Scott, each of whom he has either met or corresponded with.

 Jeremy has presented papers before many professional academic societies, is a member of Historians Against War and has published articles and book reviews in Z Magazine, Japan Focus, the LA Progressive and on The History News Network, as well as in numerous scholarly journals.