Robert Rakove is a historian who studies U.S. foreign relations, focusing particularly on the Cold War era.  He is a lecturer in Stanford University's Program in International Relations, and has previously taught at Colgate University and Old Dominion University.  His first book, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012.  He is presently at work on a study of the U.S.-Afghan relationship and the Cold War in the Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion.  He received his doctorate in History in 2008 from the University of Virginia, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University, at the University of Sydney's United States Studies Centre, and at the Hoover Institution.