I am a Fulbright Scholar and a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy. I completed my PhD at Aberystwyth University in 2010 and then became Lecturer in Modern History at the same institution. In August 2012 I was appointed Senior Lecturer in History at Oxford Brookes University before spending the 2012 to 2013 academic year as the Fulbright-Robertson Visiting Professor of British History at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, USA. In May 2016, I was a Visiting Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute. After a variety of administrative and leadership roles, including a period as Head of School, I joined York St John University in April 2019.
I have been asked to provide expert opinion and commentary to national and international audiences, such as the BBC News Channel, Global Radio, Randy Tobler Radio Show (a major Midwest broadcast in the United States), US News and World, Klassekampen (a leading Norwegian newspaper), and the Chunichi and Tokyo Shimbun (2 major Japanese newspapers).
In 2014 I curated an exhibit about the Reagan-Thatcher relationship at the National Winston Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri, which marks the location of Churchill's famous 'Iron Curtain' speech in 1946.
X (formerly known as Twitter): @Dr_JamesTCooper
I contribute to teaching across the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in American History and American Studies. I am happy to offer supervision to both undergraduates and postgraduates in subject areas that encompass modern and contemporary American history and Anglo-American relations.
My first monograph, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan: A Very Political Special Relationship (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), is the first major examination of the Reagan-Thatcher relationship with regards to domestic policy. It has been well received in academic journals. The English Historical Review (2014) describes it as 'an engaging and informed analysis ... with many new insights'. Similarly, the American Historical Review (2014) notes that the monograph's 'analysis is well-developed and persuasive' and 'provides an original and interesting contribution to the literature of the Anglo-American relationship'. A review in the Journal of Contemporary History (2014) states that the monograph's importance and impact are 'considerable'.
My second monograph, The Politics of Diplomacy: U.S. presidents and the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1967-1998 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), contributed to the relatively marginalized historiography of the American dimension of the Anglo-Irish process. My latest monograph was an examination of Anglo-American summitry in the Reagan-Thatcher era: A Diplomatic Meeting: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Art of Summitry (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2022).
Recent publications
I founded and convene the 1980s International Research Group.
