Annette Baker Fox

Annette May Baker Fox (1912 – December 26, 2011) was an American international relations scholar, who spent much of her career at Columbia University's Institute of War and Peace Studies. She was a pioneer in the academic study of small powers and middle powers and the books and articles she wrote on that subject are highly regarded in the field. She was director of the institute's Canadian Studies Program from 1977–84.

Annette May Baker was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. She attended the Buffalo Seminary, an all-girls preparatory school.

In 1930 she entered Wellesley College, but after two years was looking for a place with a greater research impact, and transferred to the University of Chicago, where political science was undergoing a transformation to a modern social science. She earned a B.A. there in 1934. She continued on to graduate school there, studying with leading political scientists such as Harold Lasswell and Charles Merriam. She was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1941.

Meanwhile, she had met William T. R. Fox during her first year at Chicago, who was also a Ph.D. student there. They married in 1935. The couple raised two children together, both born in the 1940s.

In a two-career couple, she was what later would become known as the trailing spouse. While both were still working on their dissertations, he was an instructor at Temple University from 1936–41, while she did graduate school work at Bryn Mawr College during 1936–37, then was a research assistant at the University of Pennsylvania during 1937–38 and taught at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. At Bryn Mawr, she was appointed a reader in politics during 1940–41. He taught at Princeton University from 1941–43 and during 1942 she worked as a research assistant in the State and Local Government Section of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. He went to Yale University in 1943, where he became associate director of the Yale Institute of International Studies; she joined the Yale institute as a research assistant the same year. Under the influence of the institute's director Frederick S. Dunn, she switched her area of study from public administration to international relations. There she published her first book, Freedom and Welfare in the Caribbean: A Colonial Dilemma, in 1949. It examined the post-World War II move to independence and modernization by ex-colonial states and the resulting political and economic problems and conflicts.

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