Zaynab Quadri

Dr Zaynab Quadri is a historian of the United States in the World with expertise in 20th-21st century US diplomatic, military, cultural, and political history. Her areas of research also include political economy, postcolonial studies, global histories of capitalism, and the modern Middle East.

Dr Quadri gained her PhD in American Studies at George Washington University (2022). Before joining LSE, she has previously held postdoctoral fellowships at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University (2022-2024) and in the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University (2024-2026).

Dr Quadri is currently working on her first book, Empire by Contract, which is under advance contract with Columbia University Press as part of the Global America series. The project examines the history of US private military contracting from World War II through the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Disrupting conventional understandings of defense contractors as neo-mercenaries, Empire by Contract foregrounds corporations as key historical actors that transformed domestic infrastructures of American statecraft, as well as US-sponsored state-building operations in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The manuscript synthesizes a wide range of under-utilized archival sources to chart how US defense contractors increasingly subverted legal checks of liberal-democratic governance and accountability.

Dr Quadri’s professional affiliations include the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS), the American Studies Association (ASA), the Society for Military History (SMH), and the Transition Security Project (TSP). Her writing has reached a wide range of audiences, from peer-reviewed journals like American Quarterly, to edited volumes in Middle East Studies and US Military History, to public-facing outlets like The Washington Post.

A full listing of Dr. Quadri’s CV and current projects can be found on her website at zaynabquadri.com.

Expertise:

US in the World, 20th and 21st Century United States, Imperialism and Empire, Cold War, Warfare

HY245 - The United States and World since 1776