Dr Rob Rakove
Postdoctoral Fellow
Robert Rakove has worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor of history at Colgate University and a Visiting Lecturer at Old Dominion University. He is in the process of completing his first book, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He has previously held fellowships from the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University and the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2008.
During his fellowship, Rakove will complete his first book, which broadly examines the policy of engagement pursued by the Kennedy and Johnson administration toward the leading states of the Third World, while diagnosing why it ultimately failed. Upon publication, the book will shed new light on both presidencies, as well as key shifts in world politics during the 1960s. Afterward, he will begin work on a second book chronicling the history of relations between the United States and Afghanistan in the decades preceding the 1979 Soviet invasion.
His research presentation outlining his current work, delivered at the recent Contesting "America" conference for postdoctoral fellows at the US Studies Centre, is below.
