Dr McGarr is a Lecturer in Intelligence Studies and joined King’s College London in 2023. He holds an MA degree in International History from Royal Holloway, University of London and obtained a PhD from Royal Holloway in 2008. He held an AHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Nottingham between 2009-2011 that examined the CIA and the contested history of US foreign policy. He joined the American and Canadian Studies Department at Nottingham as Lecturer and subsequently Associate Professor in US Foreign Policy between 2011-2023. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society. 

Research Interests

Dr McGarr's research interests focus on security and intelligence outside the Anglosphere, clandestine diplomacy, and covert propaganda.

He was Principal Investigator of a British Academy-funded research project from 2017-19 that examined emotions as a factor in British diplomatic and security relations with India. The project assessed the role of psychological influences alongside material factors in determining British policymaking in post-colonial South Asia.

From 2011-2016, Dr McGarr completed a series of national and international research fellowship with the Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston; Rothermere American Institute University of Oxford; British Library Eccles Institute for the Americas; and the British Science Association that examined interrelationships between US intelligence activity and American diplomacy in India and Pakistan.

Teaching 

Dr McGarr currently teaches the following modules:

• Intelligence in War Studies
• Diplomacy and Crisis 
• Intelligence in Peace and War

PhD Supervision 

Dr McGarr is happy to offer supervision in the following broad areas:

• Intelligence agencies outside the Anglosphere
• Intelligence liaison
• Disinformation
• Covert Action

Publications

Books

• Spying in South Asia: Britian, the United States and India's Secret Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
• The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
• India at 70: Multidisciplinary Approaches with Ruth Maxey (Routledge, 2019). 

Recent articles

• Brother’s Keeper: India’s “Secret Wars” and the Lure of Localism. In: Rory Cormac, Genevieve Lester, Magda Long, Mark Stout and Damien Van Puyvelde, eds., National Approaches to Covert Action. Georgetown University Press. 1-18 (In Press).
• The neo-imperialism of decolonisation: John le Carré and Cold War India Intelligence & National Security. 38(2), 271-284 (2022).
• Fake News, Forgery, and Falsification: Western Responses to Soviet Disinformation in Cold War India The International History Review. 43(1), 34-53 (2021).
• The long shadow of colonial cartography: Britain and the Sino-Indian war of 1962. In: RUDRA CHAUDHURI, ed., War and Peace in Contemporary India. Routledge. 626-653 (2021).
• From Russia With Love: Dissidents, Defectors and the Politics of Asylum in Cold War IndiaJournal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. 48(4), 736-779 (2020).
• "Berlin of the East": India and the Politics of Cold War Asylum. In: Neutral Countries as Clandestine Battlegrounds, 1939-1968: Between Two Fires. Lexington Books. 225-252 (2019).
• The Long Shadow of Colonial Cartography: Britain, the United States and the Sino-Indian War of 1962 Journal of Strategic Studies. 42(5), 626-253 (2019).
• The Information Research Department, British Covert Propaganda, and the Sino-Indian War of 1962: Combating Communism and Courting Failure? The International History Review. 41(1), 130-156 (2019).

For a full list of publications, please refer to Dr McGarr's PURE profile and Dr McGarr's Google Scholar profile