Thomas Knock is Professor of History and Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor at Southern Methodist University and Distinguished Senior Fellow at SMU's Center for Presidential History. He teaches and does research mainly in the the field of 20th century American politics and foreign relations. He earned his bachelor's degree at Miami University of Ohio and his PhD in History at Princeton University.

He is the author of To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Oxford University Press/Princeton paperback), which won the Warren Kuehl Prize awarded by the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations; and The Rise of a Prairie Statesman, The Life and Times of George McGovern (Princeton University Press) which won the 2017 PROSE Award for Biography & Autobiography from the Association of American Publishers. He has also written numerous book chapters and articles in leading scholarly journals (American Quarterly, Political Science Quarterly, Diplomatic History, etc.). In addition, he is the co-author of The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press); and co-editor (with John Milton Cooper) of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Wilson: The American Dilemma of Race and Democracy (University of Virginia Press); and, most recently, co-editor (with Jeffery A. Engel) of When Life Strikes the President: Scandal, Death, and Illness in the White House (Oxford University Press).

Professor Knock serves on the Editorial Board of Presidential Studies Quarterly and the Board of Trustees of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library (of Staunton, Virginia). He has received research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society and has been a Fellow at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University. He has served as adviser and onscreen commentator for the documentary, Woodrow Wilson, in the American Experience television series on PBS; for the feature documentary, Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern; and for the History Channel series on the American Presidency, To the Best of My Ability.