The Modern Scholar Podcast

Join me for another inspiring conversation with Chris DeCristofaro, co-host of The Library Pros Podcast and now Assistant Director at the Half Hollow Hills Community Library in Dix Hill, New York! We talk about technology, experimentation, community engagement, and more!

Enjoy this encore presentation of Becoming Veterans with Dr. Sarah Parry Myers!Dr. Sarah Parry Myers⁠ is an Associate Professor of History at Messiah University in central Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on 20th century United States history, gender, public history, and military history. She is the recent recipient of a Dialogues on the Experience of War grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, focused on generating dialogue with female veterans. Sarah’s work has appeared in edited collections released by Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge, and her book ⁠Earning Their Wings: The WASPs of World War II and Their Fight for Veteran Recognition⁠, recently released from the University of North Carolina Press, explores the history of the Women Airforce Service Pilots—and this book is the subject of our conversation today!

Kieran Hixon has over 16 years of experience offering professional development, both in-person and online, for rural libraries throughout the United States. Kieran serves nationally on committees as a rural library expert and has broad experience working in rural public libraries, and serves as Senior Rural and Small Library Consultant for the Colorado State Library. Kieran is passionate about rural libraries and is known for his high energy, humorous stories, and insightful examples when providing instruction. Former Association for Rural & Small Libraries (ARSL) President, long-standing ARSL Board Member, and Rural Library Expert, Kieran is Co-lead of the Outstanding in Their Field Leadership Institute. Take a listen to my earlier conversation with Kieran and Dr. Sharon Morris from Season One!

Growing up to be a certified bookseller in Germany, and acquiring a European Master’s Degree in Literature and Publishing/Marketing, Simone Kirk never gave libraries much thought, since reading books, and having to give them back, seemed pretty cruel to this passionate reader. Her goal to work in the publishing industry in Germany was redirected with a move to Star City, Arkansas in 2004. After arriving in this very rural area of the States, she became the Branch Manager at the Star City Branch Library, which changed everything! Simone fell in love with libraries, and decided to put her knowledge of book selling, marketing, and customer service training to work. Simone is constantly trying to invent new ways to serve her community, developing programs, and spread her love for literacy in Southeast Arkansas. She has been a member of Arkansas Library Paraprofessionals (ALPS) since 2009, is still active as an ALPS Representative, and served as ALPS Chair in 2018.

Welcome to Season 7 of the show, and Happy New Year! If you are just joining the show, welcome! I'm glad you are here. Plans for this season include conversations with some of my favorite people in the library profession - exciting! Today's discussion focuses on how libraries are an expanding universe of opportunity. The studies referenced in today's episode: Making Cities Stronger Economic Vitality The Importance of Place Libraries and Workforce Check out my conversations with David Johnson and Shelby Fleming from the Fayetteville Public Library!

Dr. Stan Fisher is a captain in the U.S. Navy and an assistant professor of naval and American history at the United States Naval Academy.  Before transitioning to classroom, he accumulated over 2,500 flight hours as a Navy pilot, mainly in SH-60B & MH-60R Seahawk helicopters. He earned a commission through the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps in 1997 and has multiple deployments on frigates, cruisers, and aircraft carriers. Fisher has also served as a weapons and tactics instructor, squadron maintenance officer, and operational test director. Additionally, he has completed tours of duty in engineering and acquisitions at the Naval Air Systems Command.  He is a past recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Naval History Scholarship and earned his PhD from the University of Maryland.  Today we talk about all of those things, as well as his recent book, Sustaining the Carrier War: The Deployment of U.S. Naval Air Power to the Pacific, published in 2023 by Naval Institute Press.

Crystal Gates is the Executive Director of the North Little Rock Public Library in Arkansas. She has a proven track record of enhancing library services, having previously led the Jackson Parish Library in Louisiana to national recognition as a 3 Star Library in 2014 and 2015. Gates holds key positions in numerous professional organizations, including serving as President of the Southeastern Library Association, Arkansas’ ALA Chapter Councilor, Treasurer of Advocates for All Arkansas Libraries, in addition to serving on ALA’s Committee on Diversity and the Chapter Relations Committee.

Dr. Jason Lantzer serves as the Assistant Director of the Butler University Honors Program. An historian by training, his research and writing interests generally center on religion, politics, and law, with some work about Disney thrown in for good measure. He is the author of eight books, including Dwight Eisenhower & the Holocaust (DeGruyter, 2023), Mainline Christianity: The Past and Future of America’s Majority Faith (NYU 2012), Dis-History: Uses of the Past at Walt Disney’s Worlds (TPP, 2017), and Rebel Bulldog: The Story of One Family, Two States, and the Civil War (Indiana Historical Society Press, 2017), numerous book chapters and articles. He is a three-time graduate of Indiana University (BA, MA, PhD).

Cari Dubiel is the Assistant Director of the Twinsburg Public Library in Twinsburg, Ohio and is the author of the Author's Guide to Libraries, which is the subject of our conversation today. Enjoy!

Terrence G. Peterson is Assistant Professor of History at Florida International University. He researches and teaches on France, modern Europe, and their connections to the wider world, with a particular focus on war, empire, and migration. His first book, Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency, was just published with Cornell University Press. His current work focuses on the Rivesaltes Camp in Southern France, which the French government used to detain a wide array of migrant populations from 1939 to 2007.

My guests today are Katelyn Knox and Allison van Deventer, who recognized each other as kindred spirits during grad school at UCLA. Katelyn went on to land a tenure-track job at the University of Central Arkansas and eventually published a book based on her dissertation. She developed a "Dissertation-to-Book Boot Camp" to help other authors get through the difficulties she experienced during this process. After the first year, she brought Allison in to help. Together they ran the course for several years, revising it along the way, and then pitched it as a book to the University of Chicago Press. That project became The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook, and is the subject of our conversation today!

Join me for a fascinating tour through the Napoleonic era this week with the professor who has made it his life's work, Dr. Alexander Mikaberidze. Alexander Mikaberidze is Professor of History and Ruth Herrin Noel Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University-Shreveport. He has written and edited over two dozen books, including the award winning The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (2020) which has been translated into five languages. He has served as one of the editors of the multi-volume Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars (2023).

Welcome to Season Six of The Modern Scholar Podcast! In this episode we nerd out with our FIRST EVER repeat guest—the wonderful and creative Alycia Asai from the Civics and Coffee podcast! Alycia first appeared during Season Two, and I would encourage you all to taken a listen to that conversation here. Since that time, Alycia completed her MA in History from Sonoma State University, and in this episode we explore her graduate journey, her work as a podcaster, and her plans for the future! Also—take a listen to Alycia's episode exploring history conferences, which we reference near the end of our conversation. It is a fantastic discussion of steps we can all take to make the most of our conference experience. For more information about the show, visit our website here. Learn more about your host, Philip Shackelford, at his website here, as well as his book, Rise of the Mavericks. As always, thank you all for listening!

Today we are celebrating EPISODE ONE HUNDRED of The Modern Scholar Podcast! It's hard to believe we are here already, and thanks goes out to all the wonderful guests and the great conversations that have characterized this series. Today the fun continues with a brief look at how to get the most out of the academic conference experience—definitely an episode to share with your students—followed by some very generous cameos from previous guests helping to celebrate 100 episodes! Enjoy!

Join me for a little bit of a different episode this week as we mark Episode 99 with a Q&A, some brief cameos from previous guests, and a quick reminder about National Library Week coming up April 7-13!

David Johnson has been a proud Fayetteville community member for over 20 years. Originally from Little Rock, he received his undergraduate and masters degree from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and his Master of Library Science degree from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In 2012, he returned to the nationally recognized Fayetteville Public Library after fifteen years with Tyson Foods where he held various leadership positions in information systems, sales and marketing, and research and development. Along with the wonderful staff at the library, Johnson shares a passion and enthusiasm for serving his community, and strives to provide exceptional library programs and services that Fayetteville citizens deserve and expect. The Fayetteville Public Library was named “Library of the Year” in 2005 by Library Journal and serves the residents of Fayetteville, Washington County, and Northwest Arkansas. Due to the incredible growth of the Fayetteville and Northwest Arkansas region, FPL underwent a large expansion project that was completed in January 2021 and doubled the size of the library to 190,000 square feet The expansion includes the addition of an expanded youth department, the Teaching Kitchen, Center for Innovation, Event Center, Art and Movement Room, and much more!

John Amble is the Editorial Director of the Modern War Institute at West Point and Co-Director of the Urban Warfare Project. He is also a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army Reserve and a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. Before assuming his current role, John served as managing editor of War on the Rocks, a digital media outlet featuring commentary on global security, foreign affairs, and strategy. He holds a BA from the University of Minnesota and an MA in Intelligence and International Security from King’s College London, where he also conducted PhD research in the Middle Eastern Studies program. He has been featured in print and broadcast media in the United States, Canada, and the Middle East, and his work has appeared in various academic journals and other outlets. He also is the co-editor of Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict, which was released by Potomac Books in 2018. He researches and writes primarily on terrorism, intelligence, the Middle East, and the military. We should note, the views that John shares with us today are his alone and do not necessarily represent West Point, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.

M. Girard Dorsey is Professor of History, Program Coordinator of Justice Studies, and core faculty of Medical Humanities, Society, & Ethics at the University of New Hampshire, focusing on military and medical history. Under the name Marion Girard, she is author of A Strange and Formidable Weapon. Her most recent book is Holding Their Breath: How the Allies Confronted the Threat of Chemical Warfare in World War II.

Dr. Sarah Parry Myers is an Associate Professor of History at Messiah University in central Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on 20th century United States history, gender, public history, and military history. She is the recent recipient of a Dialogues on the Experience of War grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, focused on generating dialogue with female veterans. Sarah’s work has appeared in edited collections released by Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge, and her book Earning Their Wings: The WASPs of World War II and Their Fight for Veteran Recognition, recently released from the University of North Carolina Press, explores the history of the Women Airforce Service Pilots—and this book is the subject of our conversation today!

Steve Biernacki is the Executive Director of the South Arkansas Historical Preservation Society, following roles as Executive Director of City Connections in Little Rock, AR and various positions with the Habitat for Humanity of Central Arkansas. Steve is here to talk about the world of nonprofits and community leadership - so don't miss this conversation!

Derek Reveron is Chair and Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He specializes in strategy development, non-state security challenges, intelligence, and U.S. defense policy. He has authored or edited fourteen books. Dr. Reveron is a faculty affiliate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University where he co-teaches a course on contemporary national security challenges at the Kennedy School of Government. The views expressed by Dr. Reveron are his alone and do not necessarily represent the positions of the Naval War College, the U.S. Navy, or the Department of Defense. John E. Savage is the An Wang Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Brown University. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Computing Machinery, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He served as a Jefferson Science Fellow in the U.S. State Department, a Fellow at the EastWest Institute, and a member of the Rhode Island Cybersecurity Commission. Dr. Savage has published over one hundred research articles, two books on theoretical computer science, co-authored a book on computer literacy, and co-edited a book on Very Large Scale Integration and parallel systems. He has given more than one hundred and eighty-five invited presentations worldwide. Together Dr. Reveron and Dr. Savage are the co-authors of Security in the Cyber Age: An Introduction to Policy and Technology which was recently released from Cambridge University Press, and is the subject of our conversation today.

Dr. Julia Irwin is the T. Harry Williams Professor of History at Louisiana State University, and the Co-Editor of the Journal of Disaster Studies. Her research focuses on the place of humanitarian aid in twentieth-century U.S. foreign relations, and we will be talking about her second book, Catastrophic Diplomacy: U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century (2023) on the show today!

Dr. Kathy Peiss is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History (emerita) at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe, published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Other books include Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986), Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (1998), and Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style (2011). She has also served as a consultant to museums, archives, and public history projects, and appeared in the documentary films New York, Miss America, and The Powder and the Glory.

Michael Kilpatrick is a farmer, presenter, inventor, and leader whose mission is to help farmers apply business principles and practical solutions to grow their businesses and simplify their lives. He has managed large organic farms and businesses, consulted for industry experts, and spoken at dozens of conferences. In 2004 Michael launched a highly diversified, year-round vegetable farm with his brother, which soon grew (no pun intended) until it encompassed several hundred acres and had more than twenty employees, selling produce to farmer’s markets, CSA, co-ops, and wholesale buyers. These days Michael continues to be actively involved in the market farming industry, managing the Farm on Central in Carlisle, Ohio, and he is a leader working to equip others. He is the creator and host of the Thriving Farmer Podcast, he is a farming consultant, and he serves on the City Council in Carlisle, working to improve his local community and pave the way for a successful and thriving small business ecosystem.

Dr. Jared Tracy is the deputy command historian for the US Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he researches and publishes on the history of propaganda, psychological operations, and other facets of special operations. Dr. Tracy served six years in the Army himself, received his MA in History from Virginia Commonwealth University and his PhD in History from Kansas State University. His writing has appeared in Military Review, NCO Journal, Southern Historian, and Veritas: Journal of Army Special Operations History. He is also the author of Victory through Influence: Origins of Psychological Operations in the U.S. Army, recently released from Texas A&M University Press, which received an honorable mention for the 2023 Master Corporal Jan Stanislaw Jakobczak Memorial Book Award sponsored by the U.S. Military History Group.

Dr. Max Smeets is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich and Director of the European Cyber Conflict Research Initiative. He is the author of No Shortcuts: Why States Struggle to Develop a Military Cyber-Force from Oxford University Press and co-editor of two additional cyber-related titles, from Georgetown University Press and Edinburgh University Press, respectively. Max is an affiliate at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and an associate fellow at Royal United Services Institute. He also lectures on cyber warfare and defense as part of the Senior Officer course at the NATO Defense College in Rome. Before his academic career, Max worked in finance in London and Amsterdam. Max received a BA in Economics, Politics and Statistics summa cum laude from University College Roosevelt, Utrecht University and an M.Phil (Brasenose College) and DPhil (St. John’s College) in International Relations from the University of Oxford.

Shelby Fleming holds a BFA in Studio Art from the Southern Illinois University of Edwardsville and an MFA from the University of Arkansas School of Art with an emphasis in Digital Fabrication. She serves as the Fabrication and Robotics Lab Coordinator at the Fayetteville Public Library in Northwest Arkansas. In her first year she has assisted with over 1800 patron projects, offered 240 STEAM based programs to the public, and assisted in coordinating the Fayetteville Public Library’s first ever Maker Faire.

Happy New Year, and welcome to SEASON 5! It’s no secret that we are very interested in the publishing process here on The Modern Scholar Podcast, and I am very excited for today’s episode because we have an opportunity to explore a very interesting and very important part of that process—cover design. I have Scott Levine and William Oates with me today—Scott is the art director and William is a graphic designer, both at Cornell University Press. They are going to take us behind the scenes today, to help us all learn a little bit more about how the wonderful cover on your favorite book is designed and produced.

Dr. Luke Truxal is an American military historian who focuses on the application of American air power during the Second World War. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Texas in 2011 and 2018. His teaching fields include Europe in the twentieth century, United States history, United States military history, and United States political history in the twentieth century. Truxal’s main research interest is the air war in Europe from 1942 to 1945. He is the author of Uniting against the Reich: The American Air War in Europe (Kentucky 2023). He is also an assistant editor for the scholarly web journal Balloons to Drones. He previously published “Bombing the Romanian Rail Network,” in the Spring 2018 issue of Air Power History. He is currently researching the air war over Romania from 1942 to 1944 with a particular emphasis on American and Soviet coordination and joint operations.

Dr. Raymond James Raymond is a retired British diplomat. He is an adjunct professor in the department of social sciences, United States Military Academy, adjunct fellow of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, Newport, Rhode Island, and professor emeritus of government and history at the State University of New York campus at Stone Ridge. He is the author of Elite Souls: Portraits of Valor in Iraq and Afghanistan, recently released from the U.S. Naval Institute Press, and this book is the subject of our conversation today!

Dr. Katherine Kornei is a freelance science writer based in Portland, Oregon. She covers Earth and space science for outlets such as Science News, Scientific American, and The New York Times. Katherine has reported stories from Asia, Europe, and the United States. She holds a BS in astrophysics from Yale University and an MS and PhD in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles. The article that we reference during the conversation can be found here, at Civil Eats.

Dr. Suzanne Sutherland is an Associate Professor of History and General Education Director at Middle Tennessee State University. Dr. Sutherland’s teaching and research focus on the relationships between war and other developments in the early modern period including the scientific revolution, the republic of letters, and the growth of states and empires. Dr. Sutherland has been involved in multiple collaborative and interdisciplinary projects including Mapping the Republic of Letters as well as the Stanford-based “Early Modern Mobility: Knowledge, Communication, and Transportation, 1500-1800.” Finally, she serves as a Subject Editor for the digital Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World and Digital Humanities Track Director for The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. She is the author of The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur: War, Diplomacy, and Knowledge in Hapsburg Europe, which is the subject of our conversation today.

Dr. Terilyn Johnson Huntington is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she also works with the Center for Teaching Excellence, is involved with student mentorship programs, and serves on the Faculty Senate. Dr. Huntington received her MA and PhD in political science from the University of Kansas, but prior to her time at Kansas she also completed a masters in international studies at the University of Denver and a masters in Theological Studies from Bethel Theological Seminary. Her research has focused on the impact of drone warfare and targeted killing as well as military intervention, and now—perhaps most fascinating of all—the interconnections between major league baseball and national security!

Dr. Katherine Carroll is an Associate Professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. She earned her MA (1996) and PhD (2001) from the University of Virginia’s Department of Politics with a specialization in the comparative politics of the Middle East. She came to Vanderbilt University in 2001 as the Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Science. After five years in administration, she moved to teaching full time in the Department of Political Science where she offers courses on the Middle East, the war in Iraq, comparative politics, and the U.S. military. From 2009 until 2019 she also directed Vanderbilt’s undergraduate major in Public Policy Studies and has continued to serve as the Associate Director since 2019. In 2008 and 2009 she took a leave of absence from Vanderbilt to work as a social scientist on a Human Terrain Team in Baghdad, Iraq. These teams were developed to provide expert social and political advice to brigade commanders and soldiers on the ground in war zones. Her publications include “Not Your Parents’ Political Party: Young Sunnis and the New Iraqi Democracy” (Middle East Policy, Fall 2011), “Tribal Law and Reconciliation in the New Iraq” (Middle East Journal, Winter 2011), and Business as Usual? Economic Reform in Jordan (Lexington Press, 2003). William B. Hickman is a retired Major General in the U.S. Army, with 36 years of experience supporting our European Allies, deployments in support of operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, and strategic and operational assignments focused on U.S. national security. His last assignment was as the Strategic Plans and Policy Director for the NATO Allied Transformation Command, Norfolk, VA. During this assignment, the Plans and Policy Directorate drafted Political and Military Alliance-wide strategic concepts, published the Strategic Foresight Analysis 2017 Report, studied strategic level decision-making through participation in NATO Crisis Management Exercises and provided recommendations to improve Alliance decision-making, and assisted the Nations in drafting the Alliance’s first military strategy since the Cold War. Hickman earned his bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Vanderbilt University in 1983 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant through the ROTC program. He later earned a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Vanderbilt University and a Master’s Degree in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College. Together Dr. Carroll and General Hickman are co-editors of the book Understanding the U.S. Military, which is the subject of our conversation today.

Major Ben Griffin is the Chief of the Military History Division in the History Department at the United States Military Academy. He is the author of the recently published Reagan’s War Stories which examines how the Reagan Administration used fiction to think about the military balance of power in Europe and throughout the world. Ben holds a PhD and MA in History from the University of Texas at Austin, a MA in International Security Studies from the University of Arizona, and a BS in History from the United States Military Academy. He commissioned as a Military Intelligence Officer after his graduation from West Point in 2006 and has been stationed at Ft Drum, NY, Ft Hood, TX, and Ft Riley KS, as well deploying twice to Iraq in support of Operations Iraqi Freedom and New Dawn. As always when speaking with guests employed by the Federal Government is important to point out that Major Griffin’s comments represent his opinions alone and do not represent the views of the U.S. Military Academy, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.

Dr. David Gellman is Professor of History at DePauw University, where he has taught since 1999. His book Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York was published in Spring 2022 by Three Hills, and imprint of Cornell University Press. Among his other publications are Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777-1827 and Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777-1877. Both were selected as Choice Outstanding Academic Titles. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the Early Republic and has held research fellowships at the Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. In addition, he has published two essays on rock legend Bruce Springsteen and is co-host of a long-running music radio show on WGRE, 91.5 FM, in Greencastle, Indiana.

Today I visited the Twinsburg Public Library in Twinsburg, Ohio to deliver a book talk about my book Rise of the Mavericks—the last book event of the year! It was a very special opportunity, because this is the library where I started my library career, first as a volunteer and then as a page, shelving books! Cari is the assistant director here, and so we took a few minutes to visit about the library and about the role of libraries in their communities. Enjoy!

Betsy Rohaly Smoot is an intelligence historian interested in early twentieth-century cryptology and communications who has published articles in both Cryptologia and Intelligence and National Security. She spent 34 years at the National Security Agency as an analyst, manager, and, for her final ten years, as a historian in the Center for Cryptologic History. She is the author of the newly released book Parker Hitt: The Father of American Military Cryptology (University Press of Kentucky) and the forthcoming From the Ground Up: American Cryptology During World War I (the Center for Cryptologic History). Betsy holds a BA from Mary Washington College and an MS in Strategic Intelligence from what is now the National Intelligence University. Betsy and I have crossed paths over the years during the Society for Military History annual conferences and I’m very excited to have her on the show today and hear about her new book exploring the life of Parker Hitt!

Dr. Rebecca Sharpless is a Professor of History at Texas Christian University, where she teaches American history, women’s history, history of food in America, the history of Texas, and Southern history. She is a past-president of the Oral History Association, a past-president of the Southern Association for Women Historians, and she has also served on the Executive Council of the Texas State Historical Association. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960, and her most recent book Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South, which is the subject of our conversation today.

Dr. Jacqueline Hazelton is Executive Editor of the journal International Security at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. Dr. Hazelton came to the Belfer Center from the Naval War College where she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Strategy and Policy. At the Naval War College, Hazelton taught strategy and policy to U.S. and international military officers and their civilian equivalents. Her courses for officers focused on understanding the political effects of military force and how to translate military strategy into desired policy outcomes. Hazelton’s research ranges from grand strategy, great power military intervention, and U.S. foreign and military policy to counterinsurgency, terrorism, and the uses of military power. She recently published Bullets Not Ballots: Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare and is working on a manuscript about great powers and military interventions.

Dr. Karin Wulf is a Professor of History at Brown University and the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library. Before coming to the John Carter Brown Library and Brown University in 2021, she was the Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture a and Professor of History at William and Mary. A historian of gender, family and politics in eighteenth-century British America, Dr. Wulf earned her PhD at Johns Hopkins University. She is an elected fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Royal Historical Society, among other learned societies. Dr. Wulf was appointed by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam to the commonwealth’s American Revolution 250 Commission, and her service to scholarly organizations includes terms on the boards of ORCID and the National History Center. With Keisha Blain and Emily Prifogle she is a co-founder of Women Also Know History. At William and Mary she was a co-founder of the Neurodiversity Initiative and continues to be deeply engaged with issues around disability and diversity. She writes regularly on history and the humanities, #VastEarlyAmerica, the politics and processes of libraries, publishing, and scholarship for national media and for the Scholarly Kitchen, the blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing.

Dr. Kari Frederickson is a professor of history and past chair of the department of history at the University of Alabama. She is author of The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968 and coeditor of Making Waves: Female Activists in Twentieth-Century Florida. She is also the author of Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South, which is the subject of our conversation today. We’ll also explore her new book, Deep South Dynasty: The Bankheads of Alabama, which was released in November 2021. Dr. Frederickson received her PhD from Rutgers University and her research interests include African-American history, Southern history, and American political history since 1865.

Dr. Edward B. Westermann received his PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is a Regents Professor of History at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. He has published extensively in the areas of the Holocaust, genocide, and German military history. He is the author of four books and two co-edited volumes including Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East (2005) and Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (2016). He was a Fulbright Fellow in Berlin, a three-time German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Fellow, and a J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. His most recent work, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany, appeared with Cornell University Press in association with the Holocaust Museum in March 2021, and is the subject of our conversation today.

Katie Stallard is a senior editor at the New Statesman magazine where she writes about China and global affairs. She’s also a non-resident global fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., and she has written for various publications including The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Wall Street Journal, and The Diplomat, and has appeared as an analyst for multiple media outlets. Previously based in Russia and China as a foreign correspondent for Sky News, she has reported from more than twenty countries to date, covering conflicts, natural disasters, and some of the world’s most repressive regimes. Katie is also the author of Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea, published by Oxford University Press in May 2022, and this book is the subject of our conversation today.

Dr. Brian Laslie is the Command Historian at the United States Air Force Academy. He previously served as the Deputy Command Historian at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and  as the Historian, 1st Fighter Wing, Langley Air Force Base, home to the 94th and 27th Fighter Squadrons. A 2001 graduate of The Citadel: The Military College of South Carolina and a historian of air and space power studies, Dr. Laslie received his Master’s degree from Auburn University Montgomery in 2006 and his Doctorate in history from Kansas State University in 2013. His first book The Air Force Way of War: U.S. Tactics and Training after Vietnam (Kentucky, 2015) was published in the Spring of 2015 and landed on the 2016 Chief-of-Staff of the Air Force’s Reading List and the 2017 Royal Air Force’s Chief of the Air Staff Reading List. Dr. Laslie is currently finishing work on his fourth book manuscript as well as serving as the Air Power and Aviation Series Editor for the University Press of Kentucky.

Eric Jay Dolin is the author of fifteen books, including Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U.S. Maritime History. His most recent book before Rebels at Sea is A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes, which was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Booklist, Library Journal, and the editors at Amazon. It was also selected as a “Must Read” book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book for 2020. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his PhD in environmental policy, Dolin lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his family.

Dr. Mark Stout is former Senior Lecturer in the Governmental Studies department at Johns Hopkins University. From 2013 to 2021 he was the director of the MA in Global Security Studies and he directed the post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Intelligence from 2014 to 2019. He previously worked for thirteen years as an intelligence analyst, first with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and later with the CIA. He has also worked on the Army Staff in the Pentagon and at the Institute for Defense Analyses. In addition, from 2010 to 2013 he was the Historian and Curator at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. Dr. Stout is a series co-editor of Georgetown University Press’ Studies in Intelligence History book series. He is a contributing editor at War on the Rocks and he was the founding President of the North American Society for Intelligence History from 2016-2019. He is the co-author or co-editor of several books and has published articles in The Journal of Strategic Studies, Intelligence and National Security, Studies in Intelligence, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. He has a book on American intelligence in World War I under contract to the University Press of Kansas. Dr. Stout has degrees from Stanford and Harvard Universities and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. His research interests include American intelligence history and military thought.

Rachel Bair is the Director for Sustainable Food Systems at Kalamazoo Valley Community College, where she has led the development of programming that focuses on sustainability and community economic development in the food system, including the launch and growth of the ValleyHUB food hub at the Food Innovation Center. Prior to her role at Kalamazoo Valley Community College, Rachel worked in the nonprofit sector as the director of the statewide Double Up Food Bucks program, which matches SNAP benefits spent on healthy Michigan-grown foods. Rachel earned her bachelor’s in Biology from Northwestern University, followed by a master’s of Public Health and Master of Science in Natural Resources from the University of Michigan. Rachel works with food because it is a great tool for building connections—within communities, and between people and the Earth that sustains us—and I’m looking forward to learning more throughout the conversation today!

Dr. Cameron Zinsou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Military History at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Dr. Zinsou received his Ph.D. in History at Mississippi State University, and his master’s and bachelor’s in History at the University of North Texas. He is an active member of the Society for Military History and served as the Graduate Student Representative for the SMH from 2016-2018. He also received the Allan R. Millett Dissertation Research Fellowship Award for his dissertation, “Occupied: The Civilian Experience in Montélimar, 1939-1945” in 2017. Dr. Zinsou’s work focuses on the intersection of civil-military relations, occupation, and military strategy and operations of the Second World War, and we’ll be talking about his research today.

*Apologies for a slight difference in audio quality on today's episode.* Ali Wyne is a senior analyst with Eurasia Group’s Global Macro-Geopolitics practice, focusing on US-China relations and great-power competition. He has served as a junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a research assistant at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. Ali has also been a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute. He received dual bachelor’s degrees in management science and political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. Ali is the author of America’s Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition, and we’ll be talking about this book today on the show. Ali is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a David Rockefeller fellow with the Trilateral Commission, and a security fellow with the Truman National Security Project. He also serves as a member of Foreign Policy for America’s Board of Directors and as a member of the American Pakistan Foundation’s Leadership Council. Also – and I was particularly inspired to see this in his bio on the Eurasia Group website – Ali is an avid coffee drinker, and continues to expand his collection of coffee mugs, cups, and tumblers, so with that, thank you very much for being here and sharing your time today, I appreciate it!