Matt Frakes
Bio:
Matthew Frakes is a Ph.D. candidate in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. His work focuses on United States diplomatic and political history, with particular emphasis on the late Cold War and the emergence of the post-Cold War world. His dissertation, titled “Rogue States: The Making of America’s Global War on Terror, 1980-1994,” examines the debates over what role the United States and its European allies should play in shaping the post-Cold War international order and defending it against the growing and related threats of rogue states, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism. In addition to his doctoral work, he also conducts research for the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. He received his A.B. in history from Princeton University in 2013, an M.A. in international and world history from Columbia University in 2017, an M.Sc. in international and world history from the London School of Economics in 2017, and an M.A. in history from the University of Virginia in 2019.
Thesis Description:
Rogue States: The Making of America’s Global War on Terror, 1980-1994
Matt’s dissertation examines the emergence of the new global order that replaced the Cold War world. It investigates the debates over what role the United States and its European allies should play in shaping that order and defending it against the growing and related threats of rogue states, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism. These critical challenges that would come to dominate the post-Cold War world were emerging underneath the headline-grabbing transformations in U.S.-Soviet relations in the final decade of the Cold War. Strategies to address these new threats would come to replace anticommunism and containment of Soviet power as the defining framework for American foreign relations.
