Matthew Frakes graduated from the Columbia–LSE dual degree program in 2017 after completing his thesis entitled “A Breach in the Special Relationship? Reagan, Thatcher, and the American Invasion of Grenada, 1983.” His research took him from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to the British National Archives and Cambridge University’s Churchill Archives Centre.
After graduating from Columbia and LSE, Matt earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of Virginia and held a postdoctoral fellowship with the America in the World Consortium and the Henry Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at the Ohio State University.
Matt’s research focuses on the history of U.S. foreign relations and national security strategy, with particular emphasis on the late Cold War and the emergence of the post–Cold War world. His first two books build on the research he began in the dual degree program and continued for his doctoral dissertation. His first book, Rogue States: The Making of America’s Global War on Terror (Cornell University Press, 2026), examines the origins of post–Cold War U.S. strategy in response to the emerging transnational security threats of rogue states and terrorism from the early Reagan years to the aftermath of the Gulf War. His second book, Grenada 1983: American Resurgence towards the End of the Cold War (Osprey, 2026), reveals the lasting impact of the U.S. invasion of Grenada on America’s approach to using military force in the post–Cold War world.
