Timothy Nunan is a scholar of international and global history whose research explores how actors from the former Soviet Union, Iran, and Afghanistan have sought to challenge the Western-dominated world order. His work combines the methods of international history with the analytical tools of Area Studies, allowing for a deep engagement with regional contexts while addressing transnational and global questions. Since October 2022, he has held the position of Professor for Transregional Cultures of Knowledge in the Department for Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies (DIMAS) at the University of Regensburg.

Timothy earned his B.A. from Princeton University in 2008 before studying at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he was a Fulbright Scholar from 2008 to 2009. He went on to pursue graduate studies at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, completing his M.Phil. in 2011 and his D.Phil. in 2013 as a Rhodes Scholar.

Following the completion of his doctorate, Timothy was selected as a Harvard Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, beginning in the autumn of 2013. During his time at Harvard, he revised his doctoral dissertation into his first book, Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan. Published in February 2016 by Cambridge University Press as part of the Global and International History Series (edited by Erez Manela, John McNeill, and Aviel Roshwald), the book examines the history of international development and humanitarianism in Afghanistan from the early Cold War period through to the rise of the Taliban. Drawing on archival sources in several languages and dozens of interviews, the book follows a diverse range of international actors – including American hydrologists, German foresters, Soviet gas engineers, French doctors, and Swedish NGO workers – who sought to shape the Afghan state during its transformation from the mid-1950s to the early 1990s. A Russian-language translation of Humanitarian Invasion was published by Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie in 2022, with the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).

In 2014–2015, he was a visiting scholar at the Zentralasien-Seminar of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Supported by a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he began research for his second book project, tentatively titled Believing Globally: Islamist Internationalism Between the Cold War and Decolonization. This project investigates how Islamist intellectuals, particularly from Shi’a traditions, responded to Cold War dynamics and formulated visions for a global Islam that transcended the dominant ideologies of the era: capitalism, as championed by the United States, and Communism, embodied by the Soviet Union. Using sources in Persian, Arabic, and Russian, he explores how clerics and activists articulated competing projects of Islamist internationalism, placing these alongside other forms of ‘South-South’ solidarity such as socialist internationalism, Afro-Asianism, and Pan-Arabism. He continued this work during a second year at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies in 2015–2016, before taking up a position at the Freie Universität Berlin.

From 2016 to 2022, he was an Assistant Professor (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) and later Acting Chair in Global History at the Center for Global History at the Freie Universität Berlin. There, his research was supported by a prestigious Freigeist Fellowship from the Volkswagen Foundation. In 2020, he was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize, the German Research Foundation’s most significant prize for early-career researchers.

As his various projects at the intersection of area studies and global history demonstrate, Timothy’s interests also include the history of international thought. As a Fulbright Scholar in Berlin in 2008–2009, he translated several key works by Carl Schmitt on war and international order. These translations, accompanied by a critical introduction and scholarly commentary, were published by Polity Press in 2011 under the title Writings on War.

Between 2014 and 2017, Timothy served as Executive Director of the Toynbee Prize Foundation, where he conducted interviews with leading historians of global and international history for the Global History Forum. An archive of these interviews is available on his Writings page.

Since 2017, Timothy has been a co-editor of the Columbia Series in Global and International History, alongside Dominic Sachsenmaier and Cemil Aydin. He has also been a member of the Editorial Collective of the journal Humanity since 2018, working with scholars including Ayça Çubukçu, Tobias Kelly, Angela Naimou, Vasuki Nesiah, and Jessica Whyte.