My scholarship takes place at the nexus of history of technology, diplomatic history, and international history. I study how space, nuclear, and information technologies have shaped international politics since 1945. 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 award-winning international history of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) more popularly known as “Star Wars.” The book uses newly declassified sources to reveal SDI’s linkages with intensifying U.S. - Soviet military space competition beginning in the 1970s. The book explores SDI’s impact on U.S. - Soviet relations, arms control, and transatlantic alliance dynamics as well as the program’s influence on post-Cold War space security.   

My second book project (under advance contract with MIT Press), entitled Wiring an Empire: Information Networks and U.S. Global Power in the Cold War, explores how the United States and its allies built a worldwide network of subsea cables, communications satellites, satellite ground stations, and radio links to move data. Yet hubs and critical nodes of the network – often in far flung places –were vulnerable to sabotage and political upheaval. Protecting these sites drew the United States into new geographic entanglements, making the movement of data as much a political challenge as a technical one.