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Professor Saki R Dockrill,
Chair of Contemporary History and International Security,
Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
By Dr Effie Pedaliu, Senior Lecturer in International History, University of the West of England, Bristol.
Saki Ruth Dockrill died on 8 August 2009 in London after a long and courageous battle against cancer. She was an eminent historian of the Cold War, British and American foreign policy, international relations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Pacific War and its long-term ramifications for East Asian security.
Born in Osaka, Japan on 14 December 1952, Saki Dockrill gained a Masters in Law (LL.M) from Kyoto University in 1976, and a Masters degree in International Relations from the University of Sussex, in 1982. She received her PhD from King’s College, University of London, in 1988. Her doctoral thesis on West German Rearmament, Britain and NATO was published under the title Britain's Policy for West German Rearmament, 1950-1955 by Cambridge University Press in 1991. During 1988-89, she was with the Department of History, Yale University, USA having been awarded one of the first three John M. Olin Fellowships. She regarded her time at Yale as an invaluable experience. It shaped her academic work for years to come, allowing her the opportunity to embark on assiduous archival research in American presidential libraries and NARA. She was thus able to broaden her understanding of US foreign policy, related national security issues, and America’s interaction with Britain, continental Europe and Japan, and in the meantime she acquired the confidence to address a larger international audience. The Eisenhower archives at Abiline, Kansas became her home from home and she acquired a unique familiarity with their holdings. Her work there culminated in a series of articles and in her monograph Eisenhower's New Look National Security Policy, 1953-1961 (Macmillan/St Martin's, 1996) which is still a reference point for historians of this period.
After her return to Britain, she joined the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, serving successively as MacArthur Fellow, in 1992, lecturer, from 1992, senior lecturer from 1997 and in April 2003 she was promoted Professor of Contemporary History and International Security. Devoted to the college and her department, she soon emerged as a scholar of international renown, an excellent lecturer and a model administrator. Above all, however, Professor Dockrill was an inspirational, effective and approachable teacher. She invariably made time available to her students and few will forget her lively and wide-ranging seminars. She would share her knowledge and opinions with them freely whilst acknowledging theirs. Often, discussions would continue well after the end of the seminar. Along with her husband, the distinguished historian, Professor Michael L. Dockrill, she nurtured intellectually a generation of international historians well beyond KCL and the University of London. Her co-editing with G. Hughes of Palgrave Advances in Cold War History, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) was a product of her desire to make available to students a textbook that contained recent historiographical developments on the Cold War. Her strengths as a teacher were recognised formally when in 2002 she was elected as a member of the Higher Education Academy.
Saki Dockrill was a thoughtful scholar with an extraordinary capacity for hard work and attention to detail. Her intellect was impressive. She combined an enquiring and restless mind with forensic research, and she was always ready to confront and consider new historical interpretations, never letting go of a topic until all aspects had been considered. Her voluminous publications have enriched immeasurably, the historiography of topics ranging from the Pacific War, the Cold War, transatlantic relations, Britain and Europe, the British Retreat from East of Suez and US national security policy covering the Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush administrations. All her work was based on the deep mining of British, American, Japanese, French and German archives. She was fluent in several languages. In addition, to the books already mentioned she also authored or co-edited the following works: From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima, (ed.) (Macmillan, 1994), Controversy and Compromise: Alliance Politics, between Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States, 1945-67 (ed) (Philio, 1998), Cold War Respite: The Geneva Summit of July 1955 (edited with G. Bischof) (Louisiana University Press, 2000); Britain’s Retreat from East of Suez: The Choice between Europe and the World? (monograph), (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); The End of the Cold War Era: The Transformation of the Global Security Order, (monograph), (Hodder Arnold/OUP, 2005). She was the General Editor of the Macmillan Palgrave Cold War History and the Global Conflict and Security Book Series. She turned them both into hubs of innovative thinking and approaches. Nearly thirty books were published under her stewardship. Right up right up to the very last days of her final illness, she was working actively on a number of major research projects, including the Pacific War, its legacy and contemporary East Asian security.
Professor Dockrill received research awards from the British Academy, the British Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the European Union, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Japan Foundation and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation. Most recently, she was awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for her project ‘Impossible Victory: Japan in the Pacific War and its Contemporary Legacy’.
Professor Dockrill was full of dynamism and energy. She was a co-convenor of the International History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, an Associate Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS), a member of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the British International Studies Association, the British International History Group, the International Institute of Strategic Studies and Chatham House. She was an academic consultant for the CNN Series on the Cold War. In 2002 she was invited to be a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. She served as academic director for the European Union funded project for the History of International Relations with Florence University, Université Paris IV Sorbonne and the Moscow State Institute for International Relations. In 1995, she was co-director for an international project on the Geneva Conference of 1955 with the Dwight D. Eisenhower Centre, University of New Orleans. She served on the editorial boards of many academic journals. At the time of her death, she was a lead member of the Asian Security & Warfare Research Group at KCL.
Saki was not bound by the academic world. She was a fun-loving, feisty, elegant and irrepressible woman with an array of interests. She was an accomplished pianist and painter and a keen gardener. She loved the cinema, theatre, pop music and dancing. She was fascinated by the intricacies of jazz. She researched the tides of fashion - Harvey Nichols was a favourite haunt – as assiduously as any archive. Saki was a loving and doting wife, a dutiful daughter and a wonderful and loyal friend who was always there for her friends during both good and bad times.
Professor Saki Dockrill is survived by her husband Professor Michael L Dockrill.
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CCBH News Zone: Professor Saki Dockrill: Obituary
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