Luke A. Nichter is a Professor of History at Texas A&M University – Central Texas, Book Review Editor for Presidential Studies Quarterly, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar for 2017-2018. His area of specialty is the Cold War, the Presidency, and U.S. Political History, with a focus on the "long 1960s" from John F. Kennedy through Watergate.

He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan's Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford's Rothermere American Institute, a Hansard Research Scholar at the London School of Economics, and a Visiting Scholar at Bowling Green State University.

Luke is a noted expert on Richard Nixon's 3,451 hours of secret White House tapes. He is a New York Times bestselling author or editor of six books, including Richard Nixon and Europe: The Reshaping of the Postwar Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press), which was based on multilingual archival research in six countries. His current book project is Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. and the Decline of the Eastern Establishment, to be published by Yale University Press. It will be the first full biography of Lodge – whose public career spanned from the 1930s to the 1970s – also based on extensive multilingual archival research.

Also, he is the author, with Douglas Brinkley, of The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), with a Mandarin version to appear in the near future by SDX (Sanlian) Joint Publishing Company. A sequel volume, The Nixon Tapes: 1973, was published in 2015. Another of Luke's books will appear soon in Mandarin version to be published by Renmin Universty of China Press. His two volumes on the Nixon tapes were the winner of the Arthur S. Link - Warren F. Kuehl Prize for Documentary Editing, awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Jane Kamensky, Professor of History at Harvard University and Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women, called the volumes among the five best books on the 1970s.

Luke is a former founding Executive Producer of C-SPAN's American History TV, launched during January 2011 in 41 million homes. A feature of the series is "American Artifacts," a weekly program that lets viewers experience a museum, an archive, or a historic site from behind the scenes – something different than what they would ordinarily see as a member of the visiting public.

His work has appeared in or has been reported on by the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, the New Republic, the Financial Times, and the Associated Press. His website, nixontapes.org, offering free access to the publicly released Nixon tapes as a public service, was featured by CBS Sunday Morning. He is also writing a history of White House taping from Franklin D. Roosevelt through Richard Nixon for the White House Historical Association.

Luke is a recognized advocate for government openness, having filed approximately 2,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the purpose of opening historically important records to public access — work that has been officially endorsed by the American Historical Association. His petition before Judge Royce Lamberth of the District Court for the District of Columbia unsealed thousands of pages of government records in the custody of the National Archives and Records Administration.

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Updated: 2/3/2019