My research explores how technology shaped U.S. foreign relations, alliance dynamics, defense strategy, and superpower competition in the Cold War. My work draws from archives in Australia, Europe, New Zealand, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. I have been awarded grants from the Stanton Foundation and the Smith Richardson 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 how the nuclear age shaped the global information networks that constituted the “connective tissue” of American power in the Cold War. I detail how the United States grappled with the challenge of moving data on a global scale, rapidly and securely, to realize its national security ambitions. This project emphasizes the political and security dimensions of the physical infrastructure – submarine cables, satellites, and long-range radio – for transmitting data. Moreover, since this infrastructure both depended on allied territories and served as a vital informational link with allies in Europe and Asia, this book explores the nexus between information networks and alliance dynamics. An article drawn from this project can be accessed here.