The Modern Scholar Podcast

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!