Carrissa Anderson

Profile

I earned my Bachelor’s of Arts in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, during which time I spent a year abroad at the University of East Anglia. I then earned my Master’s of Arts degree, also in History, at Howard University. I was inducted there into the Phi Alpha Theta historical honors society. Before beginning my doctoral research at the University of Leeds, I spent four years teaching American, African-American, and Women’s History at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, California. I am currently a member of the Royal Historical Society.

Research interests

My research focuses on US intelligence communities during the 1950s within the context of ‘stay behind’ programs against Soviet Invasion. Specifically, I aim to contextualize the FBI’s “Stay-Behind” and “Escape and Evasion” programs in Alaska (1950–1957) within the greater scholarship of stay behind programs that have mainly focused since the early 1990s on Western European clandestine networks. I will also link these programs to the growing powers of intelligence communities during the early Cold War through their relationships with presidential administrations, the militarization of Alaska as part of the United States’ national defense policy and how that contributed to its statehood in 1959, and the United States Air Force’s assumed responsibility over the program early on and the perceived threat of a Soviet aerial invasion. 

This research is generally linked to the following fields:

• Alaskan History
• United States history
• The Cold War
• Military history
• United States intelligence
• US Presidents 
• NATO
• US-Canada Relations  

Qualifications

• BA History
• MA History