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), Wiring an Empire: Information Networks and U.S. Global Power in the Cold War,  details how the United States and its allies became dependent on communications infrastructure – subsea cables, radio networks, and satellite communications – that is fragile and vulnerable to attack. The same communications technologies that catalyzed globalization were also critical infrastructural elements of U.S. diplomacy, alliances, military power, and political influence. Mitigating the vulnerabilities of this infrastructure therefore became a top U.S. national security priority and relied on a coalition of commercial and government organizations in the United States and abroad. Lessons from the Cold War take on new importance as global communications infrastructure has once again become an arena of great-power competition. 

I have a series of research projects that explore the infrastructural elements of U.S. global power in the Cold War. I use the term “infrastructure” in reference to U.S. facilities for communications, nuclear early warning, intelligence, logistics, and satellite tracking that were hosted on foreign territories. Although these sites had smaller footprints than traditional military bases, they were no less consequential for U.S. national security. Drawing on declassified U.S., Australian, British, Canadian, and New Zealand documents, I show how this infrastructure shaped U.S. alliance dynamics and shed light on “peripheral” geographies — such as British Indian Ocean territories —that were in fact critical nodes of U.S. power in the Cold War. My first article drawn from this research agenda was published in International Security and can be downloaded here.