Leyatt Betre

Leyatt Betre

  • Affiliate

Biography

Leyatt Betre completed her Ph.D. from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her dissertation, "The Production of Arms and Influence: Weapons, Diplomacy, and the Technopolitics of Nuclear Strategy," interrogated the political and historical origins of strategic narratives commonly associated with nuclear weapons systems by examining the technical communities responsible for designing and developing them.

Leyatt's research interests cluster around two main areas: 1) the historical relationships connecting ideologies of Cold War rationality, militarism, and techno-optimism in the United States; and 2) transnational histories of anti-colonial struggle and disarmament advocacy in the Global South. In both of these areas, she is concerned primarily with the question of how sites of political struggle serve to concretize, unravel, and disseminate specific understandings of previously contested projects of sociotechnical intervention.