We are happy to announce that Dr. Barbara Zanchetta has joined the Interational History department as a Senior Researcher to work on a research project called Reassessing the End of the Cold War funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She is specifically working on American foreign policy towards the Middle East during the last decade of the Cold War, and on a monograph provisionally titled The United States and the ‘Arc of Crisis’: American foreign policy, radical Islam and the end of the Cold War, 1979-1989.

A historian of the Cold War and of American foreign policy, Dr. Zanchetta has studied US-Soviet nuclear arms control, American policies towards the Third World and, more specifically, US policies in the Middle East and neighboring regions (such as Angola and the Horn of Africa). She has published various articles and book chapters on these and related issues and has frequently offered comments for the media. She is the author of The Transformation of American International Power in the 1970s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) and the co-author of Transatlantic Relations since 1945: An Introduction (London: Routledge: 2012). 

Dr. Zanchetta earned her PhD in History of International Relations at the University of Florence in 2007, and her Italian university degree in Political Science at the University of Urbino in 2003. She has been a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Tampere in a project on transatlantic relations during the Cold War funded by the Academy of Finland. Dr. Zanchetta then moved on to a research position at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki, where she focused on US foreign policy, transatlantic relations and “out of area” security issues, and nuclear arms control and non-proliferation. Dr. Zanchetta is also a scholar at the Machiavelli Center for Cold War Studies in Italy and in 2012 was a Visiting Fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.