In Memoriam: Saki Ruth Dockrill (1952–2009)

The members of the Editorial Board of Cold War History are very sad to announce the death of one of their founding members, Saki Ruth Dockrill, on 8 August 2009, after two and a half years of battling with cancer.

Saki Kamura was born in Kyoto, Japan, on 14 December 1952; she was raised as an only child by her mother and maternal grandmother after the divorce of her parents. Having obtained Master of Laws (LLM) from Kyoto University and a Masters degree in International Relations at the University of Sussex, she decided to study international relations, as one should do, by moving to another country and even to another continent: she came to Britain, where she joined the Department of War Studies, King's College London, initially as a PhD student under the then Dr Michael Dockrill. Soon he asked Professor Lawrence Freedman to take on the supervision, as he thought his feelings for her were becoming unprofessional; Saki and Michael married a little later. Following the completion of her PhD thesis on West German rearmament and NATO, Saki, now Dr Saki Dockrill, was awarded one of the first three John M. Olin Fellowships in the Department of History at Yale University, USA.

In 1993, Saki Dockrill was appointed to a lectureship at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, and then was promoted to the Chair of Contemporary History and International Security. She was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS), co-convenor of the International History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Studies, as well as an Associate Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, School of Advance Study, University of London. She was a founding member of this journal, without whose dedicated support and hard work Cold War History would hardly have established itself. She was also on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Transatlantic Studies. Moreover, she was General Editor of Macmillan Palgrave's Book Series, the Cold War History Series, and the Global Conflict and Security Series; nearly 30 books (including three forthcoming) have been published in these two series.

Like the true scholar of International Relations that she was, her research and her academic itinerary were truly international, even though she chose to settle in Britain, eventually converting to Anglicanism and taking Ruth as her middle name; her mother and grandmother spent their last years with her and Michael in Cheam. During her professional career, Professor Saki R. Dockrill served as project director of an international collaborative research on the Pacific War, as academic director for the EU-funded project for the History of International Relations with Florence University, Université de Paris IV Sorbonne, and the Moscow State Institute for International Relations, Russia, and as co-project director for an international project on the Geneva Conference of 1955, with the Dwight D. Eisenhower Centre, University of New Orleans, USA. She also held a Senior Research Fellowship at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Oslo in 2002.

Her publications include:

Saki Dockrill leaves behind her husband, Emeritus Professor Michael Dockrill, and many friends and colleagues who will miss her sorely. Her kindness and generosity, her wide range of languages, her knowledge of many cultures and subjects, her scholarly thoroughness and conscientiousness, her guileless co-operativeness, utter reliability and impressive administrative skills were remarkable and will remain an inspiration to all who have known her.

Michael Cox, Jussi M. Hanhimäki, Beatrice Heuser, Ann Lane, N. Piers Ludlow, Christian F. Ostermann, Svetozar Rajak, Odd Arne Westad, Arne Hofmann, Tanya Harmer, Eirini Karamouzi, Hanna Naatanen

Cold War History will advertise a special essay prize in memory of Professor Saki R. Dockrill in the following issue.