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Jon Matlack

Project: Maneuvering towards ‘The West’: U.S. Army-Bundeswehr joint War Games as Conduit for Western Identity Formation

Contact: matlack@ios-regensburg.de

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Volker Depkat

Jon Matlack is a doctoral researcher at the Leibniz ScienceCampus where he is working on his research project, "Maneuvering towards 'The West': U.S. Army-Bundeswehr joint War Games as Conduit for Western Identity Formation". The doctoral project endeavors to identify Cold War-era War Games as a hitherto under examined resource in assessing historical narratives concerning U.S.-German relations. Moreover, the project intends to explore the implications of 'performing‘ acts of war on civil-military relations, especially with regards to American relations with the German Democratic Republic.

Jon earned his Bachelor‘s degree at Syracuse University in 2015 with a triple major in History, International Relations, and German Language. During his studies in New York, he successfully presented his Bachelor‘s thesis on American-West German exchanges on nuclear weapons in the 1960s at the Undergraduate Conference on German Studies at Moravian College, earning Best Research Project. Afterwards he pursued and completed his Master‘s at the University of Regensburg in European-American Studies. During his master‘s studies he actively participated in Summer School courses offered by the Bundeswehr‘s Zentrum Informationsarbeit (ZInfoABw), as well as completing an internship as a researcher at the Zentrum für Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr (ZMSBw) in Potsdam.

Jon looks forward to contributing to the field of Military History from an academic perspective informed by a broadened understanding of area studies and transnational interpretations of history. In November 2023, he held the prestigious Anthony D. Smith Fellowship at LSE Ideas. Find out more about his time there by clicking here.

CV

Publications

Jon-Wyatt Matlack: Allies through Thick and Thin: U.S. Navy Strategic Communication, 1986-1994, in Transatlantic Context. In Journal of Advanced Military Studies, Vol. 13, no.2, Marine Corps University Press (09.2022), https://doi.org/10.21140/mcuj.20221302002

Jon-Wyatt Matlack: Militärmanöver: Scheinschlachten oder Vorboten des Krieges? In: Russland-Analysen, Ausgabe 417, (21.03.2022), doi: 10.31205/RA.417.03

Jon-Wyatt Matlack: Operation Barbarossa 2021: Practices (Re)Rendering the Myth of the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht in Contemporary Grand Strategy Computer Gaming. In: Frictions (28.07.2021), doi: 10.15457/frictions/0007


Reviews

Jon-Wyatt Matlack, “Piero Gleijeses, America’s Road to Empire: Foreign Policy from Independence to World War One”, European journal of American studies [Online], Book reviews, Online since 27 February 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/19486; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.19486