Aaron Donaghy

Aaron Donaghy, FRHistS, is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Limerick and Director of the MA Irish and Global Conflict History program. He also serves as Chair of the Limerick History Research Seminar series, organizing and hosting distinguished guest speakers each semester. Previously, Donaghy was EU Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Harvard University and the University of Nottingham, and Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Center for European Studies. He 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, where he taught modern history. In 2022, Donaghy was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of his contribution to historical research.

 

Donaghy is one of Ireland's most successful young historians, having been awarded some €300,000 in research funding. His primary area of research focuses on U.S. foreign relations history and modern international history. Donaghy's most recent book, The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. 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. 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 analysis of international and domestic influences, 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 is the author of The British Government and the Falkland Islands, 1974-79 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), numerous scholarly articles and essays, 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 working on a study of American policy during the Bosnian War of the 1990s, which until recently represented Europe's deadliest conflict since the Second World War.