Amanda McVety

Education

• Ph.D., History, 2006, University of California, Los Angeles
• M.A., College of William and Mary
• B.A., North Park University

Teaching and Research Interests

• U.S. Foreign Policy
• International Organizations
• Disease

Work in Progress

Dr. McVety's interests lie at the intersection of international relations, science, and the environment.  Her second book, The Rinderpest Campaigns: A Virus, Its Vaccines, and Global Development in the Twentieth Century, is a history of the ultimately successful international effort to eradicate rinderpest (cattle plague). Her new book project explores the history of James Bruce's Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771 and 1772.

Courses Taught

• HST 111 Survey of U.S. History
• HST 222 U.S. Foreign Relations since 1898
• HST 236 Medicine & Disease in Modern Society
• HST 290 Pandemics in World History
• HST 410 International Organizations after WWII

Selected Publications

• "'Better and More Efficient Animals': Developing Ethiopia's Cattle in the 1940s and 1950s," Transplanting Modernity: The Environmental Legacy of International Development, ed. Thomas B. Robertson and Jenny Leigh Smith (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
• "Wealth and Nations: The Origins of International Development Assistance," in The Development Century: A Global History, ed. Stephen Macekura and Erez Manela (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 21-39.
• The Rinderpest Campaigns: A Virus, Its Vaccines, and Global Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
• "JFK and Modernization Theory" in The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy, ed. Andrew Hoberek (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
• "Fear, Want, and the Internationalism of the Early Cold War" in The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle (Routledge, 2014).
• Enlightened Aid: U.S. Development as Foreign Policy in Ethiopia (Oxford University Press, 2012).
• "The Origins of the Cold War in International Perspective" in A Companion to Harry S. Truman, ed. Daniel S. Margolies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
• "The Skinner Mission: Images of Ethiopia in the Progressive Era," The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 10:2 (April 2011).
• "Pursuing Progress: Point Four in Ethiopia," Diplomatic History 32:3 (June 2008).

Selected Grants and Awards

• Naus Family Faculty Scholar 2018-2021
• Truman-Kauffman Fellow 2013-14

Back to Directory

• Department of History
• Sue J. Henry Center for Pre-Law Education