I am a historian of contemporary science and technology. I study the impact of technology on U.S. foreign relations, defense strategy, alliance dynamics, and superpower competition. My research is supported by grants from the Smith Richardson Foundation and Stanton Foundation. 

My first book, Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative, is an international history of Ronald Reagan’s controversial Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), more popularly known as “Star Wars.” Using recently declassified documents, I situate SDI within intensifying U.S. - Soviet military space competition in the final two decades of the Cold War that emerged as détente collapsed. Both the technological and political forces that shaped SDI’s research and development trajectory through the end of the Cold War and beyond are thoroughly explored. Moreover, I detail the participation of Western European allies in SDI, thereby shedding new light on the politics of technology cooperation within the transatlantic alliance in the 1980s. Finally, I analyze SDI’s enduring consequences for space security and its connections with resurgent anxieties about an arms race in space.

My second book project explores the development of information networks that formed the “connective tissue” of U.S. global power in the Cold War. The book shifts attention away from the ships, missiles, planes, and bases that are traditionally associated with U.S. power and towards the information networks that connected them. As such, it uncovers the technical and political factors that determined the placement of submarine cables, satellite ground stations, and radio antennas as well as the geographic entanglements created by this infrastructure. Moreover, the book shows how information networks shaped U.S. alliance relationships. This project draws from archival collections in Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. An article drawn from this project can be accessed here.