Aaron Donaghy
Dr Aaron Donaghy teaches U.S. foreign relations history, modern American history, and international history at University College Dublin. Previously, he was EU Marie Curie Global Fellow at Harvard University and Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Center for European Studies. Donaghy has also held research fellowships at Cornell University, the University of Cambridge (Churchill College), and a Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellowship at University College Dublin.
Donaghy’s research focuses on U.S. foreign relations history and modern international history. His forthcoming book, The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy, will be published by Cambridge University Press. The period under scrutiny is what some historians call the ‘Second Cold War’ (circa 1979-85). It marked the end of détente, and escalated into the most dangerous phase of the U.S.-Soviet conflict since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. A spiralling arms race raised fears of nuclear war on both sides of the Atlantic. What emerged was the largest peacetime military buildup in American history, challenged by the largest peacetime peace movement. Weaving international and domestic factors, Donaghy shows how dramatic turns by both presidents—Carter to the right in 1980, Reagan to the center in 1984—led to the rise and fall of the last great Cold War struggle.
Donaghy received his Ph.D. from University College Dublin. He is the author of The British Government and the Falkland Islands, 1974-79 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and a book chapter titled ‘Margaret Thatcher’s Private Secretaries for Foreign Affairs, 1979-84’ in Andrew Holt and Warren Dockter (eds.), Private Secretaries to the Prime Minister: Foreign Affairs from Churchill to Thatcher (Routledge, 2017). He is now writing a book on U.S. policy during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s—Europe’s deadliest conflict since the Second World War.
Contact:
Email: aaron.donaghy@ucd.ie