Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor

UConn Humanities Institute Fellowship

Institute for Advanced Study Director's Visitor

Institute for Advanced Study/National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship

President, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations

UConn Chancellor’s Excellence in Research Award

UConn Alumni Assn Excellence in Research Award

Nobel Institute Fellowship (Oslo)

Guggenheim Fellowship

Harvard Warren Center

NATO Fellowship

Harry S Truman Library

Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation Grant Research

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship

National Endowment for the Arts Grant

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship

Historical Review Panel of the Central Intelligence Agency [advises  Director of CIA on CIA’s declassification programs]

Invited consultant to Department of State Policy Planning Staff

Kennan’s Warning on Ukraine

“Personal Dynamics and Presidential Transitions: The Case of Roosevelt and Truman”

“Roosevelt’s Body and National Power,”

“Kennan Encounters Russia, 1933-37,”

“Pamela Churchill, Wartime London, and the Making of the Special Relationship

“Archibald Clark Kerr, Averell Harriman, and the Fate of the Wartime Alliance,”

“After Roosevelt’s Death: Dangerous Emotions, Divisive Discourses, and the Abandoned  Alliance,”

“The Foreign Policy of Kennedy and Johnson in the Cold War”

In the spring of 1945, as the Allied victory in Europe was approaching, the shape of the postwar world hinged on the personal politics and flawed personalities of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Roosevelt's Lost Alliances captures this moment and shows how FDR crafted a winning coalition by overcoming the different habits, upbringings, sympathies, and past experiences of the three leaders. In particular, Roosevelt trained his famous charm on Stalin, lavishing respect on him, salving his insecurities, and rendering him more amenable to compromise on some matters.  Yet, even as he pursued a lasting peace, FDR was alienating his own intimate circle of advisers and becoming dangerously isolated. After his death, postwar cooperation depended on Harry Truman, who, with very different sensibilities, heeded the embittered "Soviet experts" his predecessor had kept distant. A Grand Alliance was painstakingly built and carelessly lost. The Cold War was by no means inevitable.  This landmark study brings to light key overlooked documents, such as the Yalta diary of Roosevelt's daughter Anna; the intimate letters of Roosevelt's de facto chief of staff, Missy LeHand; and the wiretap transcripts of estranged adviser Harry Hopkins. With a gripping narrative and subtle analysis, Roosevelt's Lost Alliances lays out a new approach to foreign relations history. Frank Costigliola highlights the interplay between national political interests and more contingent factors, such as the personalities of leaders and the culturally conditioned emotions forming their perceptions and driving their actions. Foreign relations flowed from personal politics--a lesson pertinent to historians, diplomats, and citizens alike.

Roosevelt's Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War

A longtime classic in its first and second editions, Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 3rd edition presents substantially revised and new essays on traditional themes such as national security, corporatism, borderlands history, and international relations theory. The book also highlights such innovative conceptual approaches and analytical methods as computational analysis, symbolic borders, modernization and technopolitics, nationalism, non-state actors, domestic politics, exceptionalism, legal history, nation branding, gender, race, political economy, memory, psychology, emotions, and the senses. Each chapter is written by a highly respected scholar in the field, many of whom have risen to prominence since the second edition's publication. This collection is an indispensable volume for teachers and students in foreign relations history, international relations history, and political science. The essays are written in accessible, jargon-free prose, thus also making the book appropriate for general readers seeking an introduction to history and political science.

Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations

This volume includes historiographical surveys of American foreign relations since 1941 by some of the country's leading historians. Some of the essays offer sweeping overviews of the major trends in the field of foreign/international relations history. Others survey the literature on US relations with particular regions of the world or on the foreign policies of presidential administrations. The result is a comprehensive assessment of the historical literature on US foreign policy that highlights recent developments in the field.

America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941

The University of Connecticut (UConn) is one of America’s top 20 public universities, according to U.S. News & World Report. It is home to more than 31,000 students, 1,300 faculty, 230,000 proud alumni, and a handsome husky named Jonathan.

The University has fourteen schools and colleges: Agriculture and Natural Resources, Business, Dental Medicine, Education, Engineering, Fine Arts, Law, Liberal Arts and Sciences, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, and Social Work. Students can choose from eight undergraduate bachelor's degrees with 102 possible majors, as well as seventeen graduate/doctoral degrees and five professional degree programs (MD, JD, etc.).

UConn's main campus in Storrs is admitting the highest-achieving freshmen in University history. Student diversity continues to increase, as does the number of honors students, valedictorians and salutatorians who consistently make UConn their top choice. It's a great time to be a Husky!

University of Connecticut

Frank Costigliola grew up in Spring Valley, New York, the son of Italian immigrants who for economic reasons had to drop out of school after the fifth grade. At the age of 25, he completed his Ph.D. from Cornell and became an assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island. His first year at URI, he began carving a homestead out of 20 acres of woodland, clearing land for a garden and pasture for a milk cow and steers. He helped build first a yurt, then a house, barn, and other outbuildings. He has been at UConn since 1998.

Costigliola’s first book, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919-33, helped introduce culture as a topic in foreign relations history. His second book, France and the United States: The Cold Alliance since World War II, also dealt with the intersection of cultural with political and economic relations while suggesting how nations and their policies could be gendered as a way of valorizing or delegitimating them. His third book, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War, explored the intersection of personal and political relations, and the role of emotions, in the diplomacy of the Allied leaders who won World War II and then lost the peace.

Costigliola has lectured throughout the United States and Europe and has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, and the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. In 2009 he served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Modern History

American History

Twentieth Century History

U.S. Foreign Relations

History

Historical Political Figures

Faculty Page

"Giants Among Us," UConn Magazine (Summer 2022)

George Kennan: The Cold War Architect Who Opposed The War

On the Life of George Kennan, Divided Between the United States and the Soviet Union

Here's Every Time Russian or Soviet Spies Tried to Interfere in US Elections. How Does 2016 Compare?

What Would Kennan Say to Obama?

'Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances' by Frank Costigliola

Distinguished Professor, Department of History

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