Patrick Vaughan

Patrick Vaughan (born 1965) is an American historian and scholar, currently teaching in Institute for American Studies and Polish Diaspora at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He specializes in the history of the Cold War and America’s use of “soft power” to achieve its foreign policy aims in the 1970s which helped turn the tide of the Soviet-American conflict.

Career

In 1999 Vaughan published an article in the "Polish Review" examining Zbigniew Brzezinski’s role in helping the Carter Administration deter a potential Soviet invasion of Poland in late 1980. This work won the Southern Historical Association’s John Snell Memorial Award and quickly opened a number of doors for the scholar.

Brzezinski wrote Vaughan a personal letter offering him exclusive access to his personal archives should he wish to expand the article into a Ph.D. dissertation. Vaughan came to Poland on a Fulbright grant and has studied in Brzezinski’s archives at the Library of Congress courtesy of multiple grants from the George Kennan Center and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

In 2003 Vaughan’s work won the Kazimierz Dziewanowski Award sponsored by the Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America (PIASA) and the Polish Embassy in Washington D.C. to honor America’s best dissertation pertaining to Poland. Polish Ambassador Przemsylaw Grudzinski presented Vaughan with this award during a banquet held in conjunction with PIASA’s 62nd Annual Meeting at Northeastern University, Boston, MA. Dr. Thaddeus V. Gromada, Executive Director of PIASA, stated in the press release “Vaughan’s work will make a major contribution to the historiography of the Cold War by redefining Brzezinski’s place in it and in the public and controversial debates over the direction of U.S. foreign policy from the 1950s to the present.”

Vaughan is preparing to publish first-ever full biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski in early 2008.

Quotations

*"You don't get an empire thirteen time-zones wide by being nice to people."—(on the Soviet Union)

Vaughan's work available in English

*cite journal |last=Vaughan |first=Patrick G. |authorlink=Patrick Vaughan |year=1999 |month= |title=Beyond Benign Neglect: Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Polish Crisis of 1980 |journal=Polish Review |volume= |issue=1 |pages=3–28 |id= |url= |accessdate=2007-06-22

References

External links

* [http://www.transatlantic.uj.edu.pl/main.php?id=39&a=worker&worker_id=23 Patrick Vaughan's profile with a photo]