Welcoming New Predoctoral and Postdoctoral Fellows

 

Jon Askonas is predoctoral fellow at the Clements Center for National Security. He is a DPhil candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where he is a Beinecke Scholar and a Healy Scholar. He is interested in the relationship between knowledge production/transmission and decision-making in large organizations. While he has worked on the political economy of innovation and Russian foreign policy, he is currently using the US Army as a lens on how organizations structure the thinking and innovation that goes on within them. His dissertation is entitled “The Costs of Cohesion: Legibility, Learning, and Effectiveness in the Vietnam War”, and it addresses the impact US Army rotation policy had on knowledge production, learning, and battlefield effectiveness, calling into question the predominant conclusion that individual replacement had a negative effect on the war effort. He has a BS in International Politics (summa cum laude) from Georgetown University and a MPhil(Merit) from Oxford. He has worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and the US Embassy in Moscow. 

 

 Galen Jackson is a postdoctoral fellow in the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles in June 2016. Prior to joining the Clements Center, he was the Stanley Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Williams College and before that he was a Stanton Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellow in the Security Studies Program at MIT. Dr. Jackson received an M.A. in international relations from the University of Chicago in 2010 and a B.A. in history and political science from Williams College in 2009.

  

 

Evan D. McCormick is a postdoctoral fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University (2015-2017). Evan’s research examines the history of U.S.-Latin American relations during the Cold War, with a focus on the intersection of U.S. development policies, Latin American politics, and human rights. His first book project, Beyond Revolution and Repression: U.S. Foreign Policy and Latin American Democracy, 1980-1989, currently under review with Cornell University Press. Evan was previously a dissertation fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, and an Eisenhower/Roberts Fellow of the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College. Evan received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia in 2015, also earning an M.A. in international relations from Yale University (2007) and a B.A. in international relations from Boston University (2003). Between 2007 and 2009, he served as a policy analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, where he specialized in U.S.-Latin American security issues.

 

 Andrew Peek is a predoctoral fellow at the Clements Center at the University of Texas, where he is completing his Ph.D. in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University under Dr. Eliot Cohen.  His research focuses on revisionist states, their proxies, and civil war.  He is also a frequent commentator on foreign affairs in the media.  Previously he served as an intelligence officer for U.S. special operations forces and a personal advisor to General John Allen, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.  During the 2016 presidential transition, Andrew served on the State Department landing team as the lead policy staffer for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.  He holds a Master’s degree from Harvard and a Bachelor’s degree with high honors from Princeton.