Areas of Interest: Research methodology, international security, nuclear weapons policy and nuclear crises, and the psychology and recent history of US foreign policy.
janet M. Lang holds doctorates in both experimental psychology and epidemiology and over the past 15 years, has also served as co-director with Professor James G. Blight of several projects, including Virtual JFK: Vietnam, If Kennedy had Lived, as well as critical oral history projects on the Cuban missile crisis, the collapse of US-Soviet detente in the Carter-Brezhnev period, and the American war in Vietnam.
She has done seminal work on the method of critical oral history, which she and Blight have used at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (1985-1989) and at the Watson Institute (1990-present).
She is author or co-author of many articles deriving from these projects, including the seminal piece, "The Burden of Nuclear Responsibility: Reflections on the Critical Oral History of the Cuban Missile Crisis" (in Peace and Conflict, 1995, with J.G. Blight).
janet Lang is also associate professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health, from which she is currently on a medical leave of absence.
Honors
Recent honors include:
• During August and September 2005, Blight, Lang, and David A. Welch, of the University of Toronto, were resident fellows working on the Virtual JFK Project at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Villa Serbelloni Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. Blight and Welch also presented their initial findings to the other resident fellows in Bellagio; and Blight and Lang screened The Fog of War for the fellows and led a discussion of it.
• Blight and Lang were also invited to give the keynote presentation to an international conference of historians of the Cold War, 27-29 in April 2006 at the Villa Medicea “La Ferdinanda,” in Artimino, Italy, hosted by the Machiavelli Center for Cold War Studies, at the University of Florence, Italy. Their presentation was entitled: “When Empathy Failed: Why US-Soviet Détente Collapsed in the Carter-Brezhnev Years.” Blight and Lang presented some of the findings from their “Carter-Brezhnev Project”—in this case, the reasons for the collapse of the nuclear arms control negotiations between the US and Soviet Union. They also challenged the other (roughly 100) participants from around the world to consider the “virtual history” of US-Soviet détente, if the arms control negotiations had succeeded, and if the events in Afghanistan in 1979 had been managed by the Soviets and Americans in a collaborative spirit, rather than as a zero-sum competition then typical of their Cold War rivalry.