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Dr Sarah Snyder

Lecturer in International History Office: 204, 24 Gordon Square Office hour: Tuesday 10-12; by appointment External phone: 020 7679 1337 Internal phone: 31337 E-mail: s.snyder@ucl.ac.uk

Sarah B. Snyder specializes in the history of the Cold War, human rights activism and United States human rights policy.  Her research interests focus specifically on the international history of the Cold War and transnational human rights activism. Her book, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network, (Cambridge University Press), analyses the development of a transnational network devoted to human rights advocacy and its contributions to the end of the Cold War. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations awarded Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War the 2012 Stuart Bernath Book Prize by for best first book by an author and the 2012 Myrna F. Bernath Book Award for the best book written by a woman in the field in the previous two years. Her current project explores the development of United States human rights policy during the long 1960s. 

She previously served as a Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Yale University, the Pierre Keller Post Doctoral Fellow in Transatlantic Relations at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies also at Yale, and as a Professorial Lecturer at Georgetown University.  She received her Ph.D. from Georgetown, a M.A. from UCL, and a B.A. with honours from Brown University.

Select Publications:

Book

Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Journal Articles

“‘A Call for U.S. Leadership’: Congressional Activism on Human Rights,” Diplomatic History (forthcoming).

“Beyond Containment?: The First Bush Administration’s Sceptical Approach to the CSCE,” Cold War History (forthcoming).

“Bringing the Transnational In: Writing Human Rights into the International History of the Cold War,” Diplomacy and Statecraft (forthcoming March 2013).

“Exporting Amnesty International to the United States: Transatlantic Human Rights Activism in the 1960s,” Human Rights Quarterly 34:3 (August 2012): 779-799.

“The Foundation for Vienna: A Reassessment of the CSCE in the mid-1980s,” Cold War History 10:4 (2010), 493-512

“Through the Looking Glass: The Helsinki Final Act and the 1976 Election for President,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 21:1 (March 2010): 87-106.

“The CSCE and the Atlantic Alliance: Forging a New Consensus in Madrid,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 8:1 (March 2010): 56-68.

“‘Jerry, Don’t Go’: Domestic Opposition to the 1975 Helsinki Final Act,” Journal of American Studies 44:1 (February 2010): 67-81.

Essays

“The Defeat of Ernest Lefever's Nomination: Keeping Human Rights on the United States Foreign Policy Agenda,” in Challenging US Foreign Policy: America and the World in the Long Twentieth Century, ed. Bevan Sewell and Scott Lucas, (Palgrave, 2011).

“Principles Overwhelming Tanks: Human Rights and the End of the Cold War,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century: An International History, ed. Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William Hitchcock, (Oxford University Press, 2012).

“The Rise of Human Rights During the Johnson Years,” in The United States and Dawn of the Post-Cold War Era, ed. Francis J. Gavin and Mark Atwood Lawrence, (Oxford University Press, in press).

“The Rise of the Helsinki Network: ‘A Sort of Lifeline’ for Eastern Europe,” in Perforating the Iron Curtain: European Détente, Transatlantic Relations, and the Cold War, 1965-1985, ed. Odd Arne Westad and Poul Villaume, (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009).

“‘A Debate in the Fox Den About Raising Chickens’: How East-West Dialogue on Human Rights Transformed the Cold War,” in The ‘Establishment’ Responds: Power and Protest During and After the Cold War, ed. Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

“The U.S., Western Europe, and the CSCE, 1972−1975,” in The Strained Alliance: U.S.-European Relations from Nixon to Carter, ed. Matthias Schulz and Thomas A. Schwartz, (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Teaching:

HIST3316/HIST9316: Détente in the Cold War 

HIST 1002: Concepts, categories and the Practice of History

HIST G072: The Cold War: An International History

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