Cold War historian who analyzed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan as a 'long goodbye'
A historian of Soviet and Russian foreign policy and Central Asia. His 2011 book A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, drawing on archives and interviews, demonstrated that the Soviet decision to withdraw was a 'long goodbye' shaped as much by domestic politics as by the battlefield. After a BA at George Washington University and a PhD at the LSE, he taught for a decade at the University of Amsterdam and is now Professor at Temple University; his second book, Laboratory of Socialist Development (2018), won the Davis and Hewett prizes.
Career Timeline
- ~2000BA, George Washington University
- 2009PhD in International History, LSE
- ~2010–2020Senior Lecturer in East European Studies, University of Amsterdam
- 2011A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press)
- 2018Laboratory of Socialist Development (Cornell UP); won Davis and Hewett prizes
- ~2020–Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies, Temple University