Ian Ona Johnson is the P.J. Moran Family Assistant Professor of Military History at the University of Notre Dame. A historian of war, diplomacy, and technology, he received his PhD from the Ohio State University in 2016, with a dissertation that explored secret military cooperation between the Soviet Union and Germany in the interwar period.

 

From 2015-2016, Ian was a predoctoral fellow with International Security Studies at Yale University. He then headed to Austin, Texas, where he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Clements Center for National Security and a lecturer in the department of history at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2017, he returned to Yale University as the Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and lecturer in the department of history. He joined the department of history at Notre Dame in August 2019.

 

His research focuses on the origins and conduct of war, and the maintenance of peace. His first monograph, The Faustian Bargain: Secret Soviet-German Military Cooperation in the Interwar Period, was published by Oxford University Press in June 2021. He has also edited the memoirs of a Russian veteran and revolutionary for publication, The White Nights: Pages from a Russian Doctor’s Notebook.

 

He is currently working on a new manuscript exploring the military history of the early Cold War, with a focus on collective security and plans for an international military force. His writing has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The National Interest, The Claremont Review of Books, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Global Military Studies Review, the Journal of Global War Studies, Technology and Culture, and the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, among others.

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He and his wife live in South Bend, Indiana with their daughter Madeleine and dog Patton.