Our Team
Andrew Gawthorpe
Group leader
Andrew is a specialist in U.S. politics and foreign policy at Leiden University. His research examines the role of liberalism and illiberalism in American foreign policy from 1900 to the present.
Martijn van Ette
Doctoral Researcher
Martijn's doctoral research examines how U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia has been shaped by perceptions of the Chinese diaspora.
Catherine Wood
Doctoral Researcher
Catherine's research focuses on the Peace Corps and VISTA programs, examining how they blurred the lines between foreign and domestic policy in spreading American ideals of modernization and development.
Kevin Maloney
Doctoral Researcher
Kevin's research aims to map and compare the values systems and related foreign policy narratives of post-Cold War U.S. presidents. He is chief public affairs officer at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
Past Affiliates
Dimitrios Kouvaras
Junior Researcher
Dimitrios Kouvaras was a visiting researcher at USLIB in 2025. During his time, Dimitrios researched U.S. foreign policy towards Greece in the 1930s and '40s. His project employs Balkanism and modernisation theory as conceptual lenses for understanding how cultural, racial and development perceptions intertwined with geopolitics in influencing American responses to the period's turbulent Greek politics. To this end, Dimitrios received a study grant to consult the archive of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies. Since his visit, he in the process of composing his findings into a journal article.
Dimitrios is currently pursuing an Advanced MA in European Interdisciplinary Studies at the College of Europe in Natolin as a European History and Civilisation scholar. In 2025, he received a first-class honours degree in History and Archaeology from the University of Athens and also worked on the research project "Antidictatorial Struggle, 1967-1974" at the university's archive. During his undergraduate studies, he completed exchange programmes in Groningen (2024), Madrid (2023) and Rome (2022), gaining interdisciplinary experience in American and Latin American studies, among other fields.