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 is a research professor at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and an adjunct professor at the Institute.
She holds doctorates in both experimental psychology and epidemiology and has done seminal work on the method of critical oral history, which she and Adjunct Professor James G. Blight developed to analyze recent US policy.
Critical oral history involves the simultaneous interaction of decision-makers, scholars, and information in declassified documentation on targeted historical episodes. The first episode Blight and Lang investigated was the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, in studies carried out at first while at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and, from 1990-2009, while based at the Watson Institute.
While at Brown, Blight and Lang, often in collaboration with David Welch, employed critical oral history to investigate the US war in Vietnam, the collapse of US-Soviet relations in the late 1970s, and several other seminal episodes in US foreign policy.
A more recent focus of their research is US-Iran relations since the Islamic Revolution, undertaken with colleagues at MIT and George Washington University.
In addition to more traditional research and writing, Blight and Lang have been heavily involved in the making of two award-winning films: The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2004), and Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived (2008).
Lang is author or co-author of many publications deriving from these projects, including Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived: Virtual JFK (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) and the seminal piece, "The Burden of Nuclear Responsibility: Reflections on the Critical Oral History of the Cuban Missile Crisis" (in Peace and Conflict, 1995).
Visit her Balsillie School website here.