David Fitzgerald

Educated in UCC, I completed my PhD in 2010 before moving to the Clinton Institute for American Studies, UCD, as a Postdoctoral Fellow. I returned to UCC in 2011, taking up a post as Lecturer in International Politics.

I am a historian of the United States and the World, American military history, and the ways in which wars reverberate in American society and culture. I would welcome proposals from prospective PhD candidates in any of these areas.

I am actively involved in developing online learning at UCC, and have received several teaching grants to facilitate the development of blended learning classes

My research has focused on issues relating to US military intervention and counterinsurgency, and more recently on the relationship between the post-Vietnam American military and US culture and society. In 2013, I published my first monograph, Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq, with Stanford University Press. The book was a finalist for the Society of Military History's Edward M. Coffman prize and received uniformly favourable reviews from Foreign Affairs, Political Science Quarterly, the Journal of Military History, and others. In 2014, I published my second book: Obama, US Foreign Policy and the Dilemmas of Intervention. Like Learning to Forget, it explores military intervention, this time focusing on White House decision-making. In 2020, I was co-editor of Not Even Past: How the United States Ends Wars, which brought together a range of outstanding contributors to assess the cumulative impact of the United States' often halting attempts to end it wars.

In 2022 I published Militarization and the American Century: War, the United States and the World since 1941, a contribution to Bloomsbury's 'New Approaches to International History' series. This book offers a concise synthesis of the key scholarship on the history of militarization in the United States since the 1940s. 

I have recently completed a book on the cultural history of the post-Cold War US Army, Uncertain Warriors: The US Army Between the Cold War and the War on Terror, which was published  by Cambridge University Press in2023. It draws on extensive archival research to explore the shifting identity of the American soldier in the years between the Cold War and the War on Terror. Specifically, the work examines the rise of a 'warrior ethos' within the US Army and explores the anxieties - cultural, social and doctrinal - that beset the Army in what would later be recognised as a time of peace.

In addition to the above, my research has appeared in outlets such as The Journal of Military History, Diplomatic History, the Journal of American Studies, Modern American History, and the Journal of Strategic Studies. I have also written for the Washington Post.