I have an M.A. in international relations from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD in history from UC Santa Barbara. My area of historical research is the history of U.S. foreign policy toward early Cold War Italy. In the past few years, my research has focused on individual Italian Americans, and the various ways in which they acted as informal diplomats and public intellectuals in an effort to shape U.S. policy toward fascist (and, later, communist) Italy.