Presenters & Panelists
Foundation Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies at the University of Kansas
Beth Bailey is Foundation Distinguished Professor, director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies, and a member of the history department at the University of Kansas. She is the author/co-author or editor/co-editor of thirteen books, including An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era and America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force. Bailey co-edits the Cambridge University Press book series on Military, War, and Society in the Modern United States, and chairs the Department of the Army History Advisory Subcommittee. She was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2017, and received the Society for Military History’s Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement in military history in 2022.
Professor of History, The University of Alabama
Dr. John Beeler is Professor of History at The University of Alabama, where he has taught since 1993. He has published extensively on nineteenth century British naval policy, administration, and operations.
President & CEO of the American Civil War Museum, Richmond, VA
Dr. Rob Havers is a military historian who currently serves as the President & CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, VA. Prior to this, he served as the President & CEO of the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, President & CEO of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Director of the National Churchill Museum at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and as a Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Havers graduated from Queen Mary University of London with a bachelor’s degree in history and politics; London School of Economics and Political Science with a master’s degree in later modern British history; and Pembroke College, Cambridge with a Ph.D. He is the author of several articles and books. His PhD thesis, “Reassessing the Japanese POW Experience: The Changi POW Camp, 1942-45,” was published as a book in 2003 and subsequently reissued in paperback in 2013.
Director of Research at the Centre for Army Leadership (CAL) at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst
Dr. Lloyd Clark was educated in war studies at King’s College, University of London, and is a specialist in all aspects of command and leadership with particular interest in fighting methods, the development of doctrine, military lesson learning, and the contemporary operating environment. Lloyd’s recent academic articles include those on high performing teams, maverick military leaders, and the impact of social change on leadership styles. His many books include: Anzio: The Friction of War – Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944; Arnhem – Jumping the Rhine 1944-45; Kursk: The Greatest Battle – Eastern Front 1943, and Blitzkrieg: Myth, Reality, and Hitler’s Lightning War: France 1940. His most recent volume is the best-seller, The Commanders: The Leadership Journeys of George Patton, Bernard Montgomery and Erwin Rommel.
Lloyd makes regular appearances in the media as a podcast guest, expert and a consultant. He has recently worked recently with the BBC on a new television series titled War in Modern Memory and a radio series titled Great Military Leaders. He is currently researching a book about the development of high performing team for military raids.
Professor and Charles G. Summersell Chair of Southern History at The University of Alabama
Lesley J. Gordon earned her BA with High Honors from the College of William and Mary, and her MA and PhD in American History from the University of Georgia. She presently holds the Charles G. Summersell Chair of Southern History at The University of Alabama. Her publications include General George E. Pickett in Life and Legend (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), and A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2014). She has published numerous articles, book chapters and book reviews, and her public talks have been featured on C-Span. She was editor of the academic journal Civil War History (2010-2015), and is now President of the Society for Civil War History (2022-2024). Her current book project explores accusations of cowardice and their lasting effects on two Civil War regiments.
Professor of History, The United States Military Academy
Professor Jennie Kiesling was born in Austin, Texas and grew up in Northern California. She graduated from Yale University in 1978 with a BA in history (and rowing) and earned a second BA, in ancient history and philosophy (and rowing) from Wadham College, Oxford. She earned a PhD in modern European military history (and bicycling racing) at Stanford University. After a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs, she took up an assistant professorship in modern French and military history at the University of Alabama, where she took up mountaineering, skiing, and sky diving. In 1995, she moved to West Point to teach military history (and rowing). During her tenure at West Point, she has been seconded to the US Army War College (as the Harold K. Johnson Chair in 2000-2001), the Australian Defence Forces Academy, the National Military Academy of Afghanistan, and the Kazakh National Military Academy in Astana. She was a founder of the West Point Humanist Society and spent twenty years failing to stay on horses. In 2018 she was voted the Dad Vail Regatta Coach of the year and returned to competitive rowing herself, medaling in the World Masters’ Regatta in Sarasota. She and her husband, Australian mathematician and rhino demographer Peter Law, bond over rock and ice climbing, cycling, concert music, and Russian blue cats.
Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dr. Wayne Lee is the Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor in the History Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He earned his BS in Computer Science and History; and his PhD in History from Duke University. His publications include The Cutting off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North American, 1500-1800 (UNC Press, 2023); The Other Face of Battle: America’s Forgotten. Wars and the Experience of Combat (Oxford University Press, 2021); and Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500-1865. (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Director of the Secretary of Defense Strategic Thinkers Program (STP) and Professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University
Dr. Daniel Marston is the Director of the Secretary of Defense Strategic Thinkers Program (STP) and Professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. He is an Honorary Professor at the Australian National University. Between, 2012-2018, he held a Professorship in War and Society at the Australian National University and was also the Principal of the Military and Defense Studies Program at the Australian Command & Staff College in Canberra. He previously held the Ike Skelton Distinguished Chair in the Art of War at the US Army Command and General Staff College and was a Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He has been a Visiting Fellow, on multiple occasions, with the Leverhulme Changing Character of War Program at the University of Oxford. He. He was a special advisor, in Iraq and Afghanistan with the US Army, USMC and British Army.
Marston has published widely on war and strategy from the 18th century to the present. Three of his books were prize winners. The Phoenix from the Ashes, an in-depth assessment of how the British/Indian Army turned defeat into victory in the Burma campaign of the Second World War, won the Field Marshal Templer Medal Book Prize (Best in British/Empire and Commonwealth military history) in 2003. The second volume, The Indian Army and the End of the Raj, was Runners Up for the Templer Medal in 2014. The third and final volume, 1945 Burma Campaign and the Transformation of the British Indian Army, with Prof Ray Callahan, won the Templer Medal Prize in 2021. He completed his doctorate as the Beit Research Scholar in Imperial and Commonwealth History at Balliol College, Oxford University. He received a BA (Honours) and MA from McGill University and a PhD from Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.
Philip A. Crowl Professor of Comparative Strategy, United States Naval War College
Dr. Kevin D. McCrainie is the Philip A. Crowl Professor of Comparative Strategy at the United States Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He earned his PhD in History from Florida State University. His publications include Mahan, Corbett, and the Foundations of Naval Strategic Thought (Naval Institute Press, 2021); Utmost Gallantry: The U.S. and Royal Navies at Sea in the War of 1812 (Naval Institute Press, 2011); and Admiral Lord Keith and the Naval War Against Napoleon (University Press of Florida, 2006).
Professor of Military History, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College
Dr. Ethan S. Rafuse received his PhD at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and since 2004 has been a member of the faculty at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, where he is a professor of military history. In 2018-2019 he was the Charles Boal Ewing Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at the U.S. Military Academy.
Historian with the Office of the Secretary of Defense Historical Office
Dr. Angela M. Riotto is a military historian, who specializes in the American Civil War era, prisoners of war, memory studies, and gender studies. She currently works as a historian with the Office of the Secretary of Defense Historical Office in Washington D.C. Before joining the OSD Historical Office, she worked as an assistant professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. She has published about multimedia learning tools and their use in the classroom with “Teaching the Army: Virtual Training Tools to Train and Educate Twenty-First Century Soldiers” appearing in Military Review. Some of her more recent publications include “‘As Happy a Man as Ever Wore ‘Confederate Grey’’: Confederate Ex-Prisoners of War and Their Narratives of Imprisonment, 1877-1890” in Useful Captives: The Role of POWs in American Military Conflicts (UP of Kansas, 2021). She is currently working on a book manuscript, Beyond the Prison Pen: Union and Confederate Former Prisoners of War and their Narratives of Captivity, 1861-1930.
Associate Professor of History, The University of Alabama
Dr. H. E. Selesky is an Associate Professor of History of at The University of Alabama. He is an historian of both armed violence, focusing on the American experience since the eighteenth century, and the era of the American Revolution.
Postgraduate Fellow at the Centre for Army Leadership, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst
Scott Sherriff is a Postgraduate Fellow at the Centre for Army Leadership and PhD student in Modern War Studies at the University of Buckingham researching modern British generalship. His previous research was published in the Royal United Services Institute Journal recently, entitled “Britain’s Forgotten Intervention in Russia, 1918-21: Does History Rhyme?” Mr. Sherriff also served in the Royal Navy.
Foundation Professor of History, Arizona State University
Dr. Brooks D. Simpson is Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University, where he teaches courses on the political and military history of the United States, strategic thought, and leadership. He is the author of a number of studies covering the period of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, with an especial focus on the life and career of Ulysses S. Grant.
Director of British Army Leadership and Commandant of The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst
Major General Zac Stenning is the 31st Commandant of The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and Director of British Army Leadership. He commissioned from Sandhurst in 1995.
Major General Stenning has led soldiers and officers from Platoon to Brigade level on deployments to Northern Ireland, Bosnia, the Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Oman. He commanded 3rd Battalion, The Yorkshire Regiment from 2011-2013, deploying to Helmand in 2012, where he commanded a Combined Force of British and Afghan warfighters. From 2017-2019 he commanded 1st Armoured Infantry Brigade, during which the Brigade led on experimentation to design and enact enhanced methods of fighting for the British Army.
At the staff, Major General Stenning was Chief of Staff 1st Mechanised Brigade between 2005-2007, which included deploying to Iraq during the urban fighting of 2007. Other staff appointments have included Assistant Chief of Staff Empowerment for the Army and Chief of Staff 3rd (UK) Division between 2014-2017. This period included the re-set to warfighting operations and initial deployments of UK Forces to Ukraine and Estonia. His most recent appointment was Head of Military Strategy in the UK Ministry of Defence between 2018-2021. In this role he worked collaboratively across the services to shape and deliver the Integrated Defence and Security Review, including oversight of strategic plans for the employment of UK Forces, Special Operations Transformation, and the National Aircraft Carrier Policy.
He holds a Bachelors in War Studies from Kings College London, Master’s degree in Defence Studies and a Masters in Defence Administration. Major General Stenning has two sons and enjoys watching all sports, walking, skiing and supporting Bath Rugby. He is an avid reader of history and leadership studies.
He is the Colonel of The Yorkshire Regiment, the 2* advocate for the British Army Multi-cultural network and is a trustee of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at Kings College London. He has recently been appointed as the Honorary Colonel London University Officer Training Corps and Colonel of The Royal Army Veterinary Corps.
Professor of Military History at the School of Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College
Dr. Barry M. Stentiford is Professor of Military History at the School of Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. His publications include Army Expansions: Augmenting the Regular Army During War (Combat Studies Institute Press, 2021); and Success in the Shadows: Operation Enduring Freedom—Philippines, and the Global War on Terror, 2002-2015 (Combat Studies Institute Press, 2018). His first book, The American Home Guard: The State Militia in the Twentieth Century (Texas A&M Press, 2002), is based on his University of Alabama doctoral dissertation completed under the direction of Dr. Harold Selesky. Dr. Stentiford has also served in the U.S. Army Reserve, U.S. Army National Guard, and the U.S. Air Force.
Professor of English, The University of Alabama
Steven Trout is a Professor of English at The University of Alabama. He is the author of several books, including The Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Angel Fire: War, Remembrance, and an American Tragedy (UP of Kansas, 2020) and On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919-1941 (U of Alabama P, 2010). In addition, he has edited or co-edited many volumes, including, most recently, Serpents of War: An American Officer’s Story of World War I Combat and Captivity by Harry Dravo Parkin (UP of Kansas, 2023). Trout edits the book series “War, Memory, and Culture” for the University of Alabama Press.
Frank and Virginia Williams Chair for Abraham Lincoln and Civil War Studies, Mississippi State University
Dr. Susannah J. Ural is the Frank and Virginia Williams Chair for Abraham Lincoln and Civil War Studies at Mississippi State University, and the Director of the Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. Trained in military history at Kansas State University, where she earned her M.A. and Ph.D., Ural is also a past director of the Dale Center for the Study of War & Society at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her publications include Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit (LSU Press, 2017); Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades: Soldiers and Families in America’s Civil War (Osprey, 2013); and The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861-1865 (NYU Press, 2006).
Head of the Department of Communication and Applied Behavioural Science at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst
Dr. Dennis Vincent was commissioned into the British Army’s Royal Anglian Regiment and conducted various roles finishing as Colonel Training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. During his time in the Army, he was awarded an operational MBE, commanded 3rd Battalion, The Royal Anglian Regiment and deployed on operations to Northern Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan and with the UN to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
He resigned from the British Army in 2015 to become a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Applied Behavioural Science in the Faculty of Leadership, Security and Warfare at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He quickly became the Department Deputy Head and the Head of Department in 2019.
He has a PhD in Military History and Leadership Studies from King’s College London with the thesis title: “Hero to Zero: The Leadership of General Sir Alan Cunningham during his African Campaigns of 1941.” He also has an MA focused on Military Ethics from King’s College London and an MSc in Leadership and Management from Portsmouth University. He is a member of the International Society for Military Ethics and is a Fellow and Chartered Manager with the Chartered Management Institute.
His research is in the areas of General Sir Alan Cunningham, Leadership and Military Ethics. He has conducted courses and been a guest lecturer in these subjects at military academies worldwide. He also consults with commercial organisations and NGOs on Ethical Leadership, Leading Change and Decision Making.
Doctoral Student and Charles G. Summersell Fellow in Southern History, The University of Alabama
Julia Wall is a History PhD student at The University of Alabama, where she is currently the Charles G. Summersell Fellow in Southern History. She earned her BA in History, with minors in Africana Studies and Civil War Era Studies, from Gettysburg College and her MA in History from The University of Alabama. Her work focuses on the United States Military Academy at West Point during the Civil War Era through lenses of race, gender, and memory.
University Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society, University of Southern MIssissippi
Dr. Andrew Wiest was born in Chicago, but raised in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. After attending the University of Southern Mississippi for his undergraduate and masters degrees, Dr. Wiest went on to receive his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Specializing in the study of World War I and Vietnam, Dr. Wiest has served as a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst in the United Kingdom and as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Warfighting Strategy at the United States Air Force Air War College. Dr. Wiest lives in Hattiesburg with his wife Jill and their three children Abigail, Luke, and Wyatt.
Dr. Wiest has published widely and presented his research at conferences and at invited talks both nationally and internationally. His books include The Boys of ’67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam and Vietnam’s Forgotten Army (which won the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award). He has also been nominated for an Emmy Award for his work on National Geographic Channel’s documentary Brothers in War, which was based on his book The Boys of ’67, and won a New York Festivals Gold Medal for his work on the History Channel documentary Vietnam in HD. He has also written for the BBC, the New York Times, CNN, and serves on the Department of the Army’s Historical Advisory Committee.
Chief, Leadership, Research, Assessment, and Doctrine Division for the Center for the Army Leadership (CAL) at Fort Leavenworth, KS
Dr. Melissa R. Wolfe is the Chief, Leadership, Research, Assessment, and Doctrine Division for the Center for the Army Leadership (CAL) at Fort Leavenworth. Specializing in leadership and behavioral measurement, Dr. Wolfe is responsible for the research and quality assurance for Army leader assessment programs, for both development and talent management. She holds Ph.D. and Master’s degrees in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Central Michigan University. She has presented at numerous academic conferences and government seminars and is a member of the Academy of Management and the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
Organizers
Professor of History, The University of Alabama
Dr. Andrew J. Huebner is Professor of History at The University of Alabama. He is the author of Love and Death in the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2018), which won the 2020 President’s Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE); and The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). He is currently writing a book on the Black army regulars from 1866 to 1917.
Associate Professor of History and
Director of Graduate Studies, Department of History, The University of Alabama
Dr. Daniel Riches is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at The University of Alabama. His research and teaching interests deal with issues of war and diplomacy in medieval and early modern Europe.
Senior Researcher at the Centre for Army Leadership, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst
Dr. Linda Risso is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Army Leadership, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, UK. She is an expert on European defence and security policy since 1945. Prior to joining the CAL, Dr Risso worked as a historian at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (NATO) in Belgium.
Her most recent publications include “Deterrence and Reassurance: Sir Michael Howard and the Nuclear Strategy Debate in the 1980s” British Journal for Military History 8/2 (2022) and “A Forgotten Success: Operation Essential Harvest, 2001” RUSI Journal 166/6 (2022); “Squaring the Circle: The Evolution of NATO’s Strategic Communications Since the 1990s”, Journal of Peace and War Studies (Special edition) Oct. 2021.