Anna Fett received her PhD in Peace Studies and History from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in 2021. She is a historian of the US in the World specializing in the sub-field of Youth, Peace, and Security. Before joining Dartmouth, she was the Visiting Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University from 2021 to 2023 where she taught courses on the topics of youth and peacebuilding, war in lived experience, and the introductory course on peace and conflict studies.
Her current book project, tentatively titled "The American Way of Child Development: Cold War Government Experiments in International Exchange Programs," focuses on how U.S. policymakers attempted to harness the energies and attitudes of young people--often through nongovernmental exchange programs that actually had much governmental oversight--in order to expand state power in the name of Cold War peace and security. Anna combines historical archival research with theoretical approaches from Peace Studies and Critical Youth Studies. She has published in Diplomatic History and Peace & Change.
Anna plans to revise her dissertation into a book tentatively titled "The American Way of Child Development: Cold War Government Experiments in International Exchange Programs." The book project considers why U.S. policymakers came to believe that interventions to foster close personal contact between foreign "youth" targets and a variety of American "parental" influencers, through experimental (non)governmental international exchange programs, was an effective strategy to advance U.S. overseas development objectives during the Cold War.