The Modern Scholar Podcast

Welcome to the VERY FIRST bonus episode of the show! I have a few random thoughts about the history profession that I'd like to share - hopefully all of you find them useful!  A few fellow podcast shoutouts: Military Historians Are People, Too! with Brian Feltman and Bill Allison Civics and Coffee with Alycia Asai Drafting the Past with Kate Carpenter Check out these folks and their shows!

Dr. Sharon Morris is an Instructional Designer at Colorado Mountain College. She has a Master’s in Library and Information Science and a Ph.D. in Managerial Leadership in Libraries. Dr. Morris has co-designed state-level library leadership institutes, and served as an instructor, in Colorado, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. She also serves on the Leadership Team and is a core instructor for the Research Institute for Public Libraries. Dr. Morris is Adjunct Faculty at the University of Denver, Library and Information Science program, where she teaches Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness. She also provides workshops on leadership topics at national conferences, library staff days, and other library venues. Kieran Hixon is the Rural and Small Libraries Consultant at the Colorado State Library. Kieran has served as President of the Association for Small and Rural Libraries and as a board member there, and is the leader of the Outstanding in their Field library leadership institute. Kieran has over 10 years experience offering professional development, both in-person and online, for rural libraries throughout the United States. I first had the pleasure of meeting both Sharon and Kieran a few years ago when they facilitated a special session of the Arkansas State Library’s ALL-In Leadership Institute that I was participating in, and it was great to reconnect on this episode today! 

My guest today is Hayley Hasik, who is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi, and her research interests include 20th century U.S. history with an emphasis on war and memory, the Vietnam War, veterans’ experiences, and cultural history. Hayley’s current research focuses on examining the legacy of the “Helicopter War” in Vietnam. Her project seeks to uncover how and why helicopters became such an integral part of Vietnam War history and memory. Hayley has extensive oral history experience and co-founded the East Texas War and Memory Project in 2012. Her previous scholarly research focused on the American POW experience during World War II and the Vietnam helicopter experience using the life history of a Warrant Officer as a case study. Hayley has presented at numerous academic conferences and has published several articles in the Sound Historian and War, Literature, and the Arts. Hayley is also a recipient of the 2022 Mark Grimsley Social Media Fellowship and 2019 Russell Weigley Travel Grant, both from the Society for Military History. She is a Graduate Fellow at the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society there at Southern Miss for 2021-2022, and she is working under the direction of Dr. Heather Stur.

Dr. Matthew Ford is an Honorary Historical Consultant to the Royal Armouries (UK), the founding Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal for Military History, a former West Point Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA. His research focuses on war and the data-saturated battlefields of the 21st century, and he is the author of numerous articles and other works, including his first book, Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation. Dr. Andrew Hoskins is an Interdisciplinary Professor in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow in the UK. He is the co-founder of two academic journals, Memory Studies from SAGE and Digital War from Palgrave MacMillan. His research is focused on enhancing an interdisciplinary understanding of how and why human society is being transformed by digital tech and media, and the consequences for forgetting, memory, privacy, security, and the nature, experience and effects of contemporary warfare. Together Dr. Ford and Dr. Hoskins are the co-authors of the book Radical War: Data, Attention and Control in the 21st Century, which is the subject of our conversation today.

My guest today is Trent Hone, an award-winning naval historian and an expert on U.S. Navy tactics and doctrine. He is the author of Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898–1945, which explores how the U.S. Navy developed learning mechanisms before World War II that accelerated victory during that conflict. His article, “U.S. Navy Surface Battle Doctrine and Victory in the Pacific” was awarded the U.S. Naval War College’s Edward S. Miller Prize and the Naval History and Heritage Command’s Ernest M. Eller Prize. His essay, “Guadalcanal Proved Experimentation Works” earned second place in the 2017 Chief of Naval Operations Naval History Essay Contest. Mr. Hone’s latest book, Mastering the Art of Command: Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and Victory in the Pacific War, is a detailed examination of Admiral Nimitz's leadership during World War II. It describes how Nimitz used his talents to help win crucial victories against the forces of Imperial Japan and create the conditions for victory in the Pacific.

Dr. Jonna Perrillo has been an education historian and a professor of English Education at the University of Texas of El Paso since 2005. Her scholarship focuses on the history of schools and citizenship, both in the sense of how schools define and translate citizenship values and how they enfranchise or disenfranchise students and teachers. She is the author of two books: Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and the Battle for School Equity (winner of the New Scholar Book Award from the American Education Research Association) and Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands. She also writes opinion pieces advocating for school equity and reform issues, and has been published in the Boston Review, Washington Post, Education Week, El Paso Matters, the El Paso Times, and a number of national teachers’ publications. Her interviews with journalists on Educating the Enemy have appeared on the Texas Standard and Time magazine.

My guest today is Dr. Mary Elizabeth Walters, and she is an Assistant Professor of Military and Security Studies in the Department of Airpower at the Air Command and Staff College. Walters received both her MA and PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She teaches Airpower I, Airpower II, War Theory, and electives on strategy and Star Wars, the Balkans, and peacekeeping. Her book project, Hospitality is the Law of the Mountains: The 1999 Kosovo War, argues that Albanians – motivated by the Albanian concept of hospitality – took strangers into their homes and communities and changed the course of the refugee crisis. Their actions bought time for the U.S. military to mobilize, rebuild Albania’s shattered infrastructure, and bring in massive amounts of aid. Additionally, she recently began research on a second project on Operation Allies Rescue/Operation Allies Welcome, which is the U.S. military support for the evacuation and resettlement of Afghans spanning 2021-2022. Before joining ACSC, Walters was an assistant professor in the History Department at Kansas State University where she taught graduate and undergraduate courses on American military history, the history of strategy, and the Vietnam War(s). *The views and opinions presented by Dr. Walters are solely her own and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of Air University, the U.S. Air Force, or the U.S. Government.

I my guest today is Dr. Ricardo Herrera, an award-winning historian and Professor of Military History at the School of Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. A scholar of eighteenth and nineteenth-century U.S. military history, he is the author of Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2021), For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775-1861 (New York: New York University Press, 2015), and of numerous articles and chapters on U.S. military history. Dr. Herrera is the recipient of several residential research fellowships, including a Maynooth University (Ireland) Arts & Humanities Institute Visiting Fellowship, 2020-2021; a Residential Research Fellowship (2016-2017) at The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, Mount Vernon, Virginia; a Society of the Cincinnati Scholars’ Grant (2015-2016); and a Residential Research Fellowship at the David Library of the American Revolution (2014-2015). Dr. Herrera has also been awarded a 2016 Moncado Prize by the Society for Military History for “‘[T]he zealous activity of Capt. Lee’: Light-Horse Harry Lee and Petite Guerre,” and two Distinguished Writing Awards from the Army Historical Foundation in 2012 and 2021 for “Foraging and Combat Operations at Valley Forge, February-March 1778” and “‘[O]ur Army will hut this Winter at Valley forge’: George Washington, Decision-Making, and the Councils of War.” He is now completing the tentatively titled A Most Uncommon Soldier: The Life, Letters, and Journal of Edward Ashley Bowen Phelps, 1814-1893, an edited collection, to be published by the University Press of Kansas.

Welcome back to the Modern Scholar podcast! Our guest today is Dr. John Curatola, a retired Marine Corps officer of twenty-two years and a history professor at the Army Command and General Staff College. During his Marine Corps career he served in Somalia, Iraq, and was a lead planner for the 2005 Indian Ocean Tsunami Relief operation. He taught both joint operations and military history at Fort Leavenworth and was named the college’s Instructor of the Year. His academic work focuses on World War II aviation and the early Cold War period. His first book, Bigger Bombs for a Brighter Tomorrow: The Strategic Air Command and American War Plans at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, 1945-1950,addressed the nature of the American atomic monopoly from 1945-1949. His lectures can be seen on both CSPAN and You tube and he has given numerous presentations at international history conferences. His most recent book, Autumn of Our Discontent: Fall 1949 and the Crises in American National Security, deals with the origins of NSC-68 and the events that occurred in the fall of 1949 leading to a change in the American military tradition of a small peacetime military. He is an FAA licensed pilot and an aviation enthusiast who considers himself a frustrated P-51 pilot that was born 40 years too late.

Join me today for a fascinating conversation with Kate Carpenter! Kate is a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Princeton University, with an MA in history (public history emphasis) from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her dissertation is a scientific and social history of storm chasing in the second half of the twentieth-century United States, which examines scientific and hobbyist storm chasers investigating severe storms and tornadoes within the environmental context of the Great Plains. She is also the producer and host of Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history, one of my favorite new podcast discoveries!