Luke Griffith, a Ph.D. student in the History Department, has been awarded the 2017-18 Baker Peace Dissertation Fellowship. The award is funded by The John and Elizabeth Baker Peace Endowment, created in the 1980s to fund teaching, scholarship, and conferences at Ohio University that promote the study of conflict and conflict resolution.
Griffith’s dissertation is entitled “Doomed to Success: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and the Euromissiles.” Therein he analyzes the role of the United States in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) dual-track decision of December 12, 1979. It was then that NATO simultaneously called for the stationing of a new generation of U.S. nuclear missiles in Western Europe and for arms negotiations with the Soviet Union. After years of arcane, complicated negotiations, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the world’s first nuclear disarmament agreement, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, in December 1987. By highlighting U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s leadership role in the formulation of the dual-track decision and by revealing that President Reagan’s views on the negotiations evolved throughout his tenure in office, Griffith’s dissertation sheds new light on a topic that will make a direct contribution to peace studies.
Griffith has completed three Ph.D. fields: U.S. diplomatic history; U.S. cultural and intellectual history; and teaching world history. He is writing his dissertaiton under the supervision of Dr. Chester Pach, Associate Professor of History at Ohio University.
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