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.

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.

Luke is the editor, 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 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2015. Another of Luke's books will soon appear in Mandarin version to be published by Renmin Universty of China Press. His work on the Nixon tapes was the 2017 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 Schlesinger Library, jointly called both 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, and his work has appeared in or has been reported on by the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and the Associated Press. A feature of the series is "American Artifacts," a weekly program conceived to give viewers the opportunity to 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 website, nixontapes.org, offering free access to the publicly released Nixon tapes as a public service, was featured by CBS Sunday Morning in 2014.

Luke is a recognized advocate for government openness, having filed more than 1,000 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. He has an ongoing petition before Judge Royce Lamberth of the District Court for the District of Columbia which has unsealed thousands of pages of government records in the custody of the National Archives and Records Administration.

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Updated: 1/14/2018