2023 Summer Seminar in Military History

Fellows were introduced to the wealth of resources available within the Museum’s collection and in the field at-large, gaining advice on how to use these valuable tools in their own teaching and scholarship.

2023 Summer Seminar in Military History

On June 30, 2023, The National WWII Museum concluded its second Summer Seminar in Military History. This partnered program between the Museum’s Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy and the Society for Military History brought together 19 Fellows from across the country and world for a three-week intensive experience to grow the study of modern military history by introducing Fellows to the profession’s fundamental concepts and questions, contemporary concerns and approaches, and leading scholars.

The program consisted of a series of content and pedagogical sessions led by the Museum’s expert faculty and guest lecturers, as well as Museum tours and a battlefield staff ride. Fellows were introduced to the wealth of resources available within the Museum’s collection and in the field at-large, gaining advice on how to use these valuable tools in their own teaching and scholarship. The Fellows also learned from Museum staff and seminar faculty on interpreting military history for the general public and mastered the fundamental techniques to develop and teach courses in military history at their respective institutions.

Highlights from the program included:

  • A staff ride to Chalmette Battlefield, where the Fellows learned how to use the power of place and terrain to develop their own staff rides using the famous Battle of New Orleans as a backdrop.

  • Professional insight from 12 working senior scholars on the cutting-edge of military history and the opportunity for the Fellows to expand their personal libraries with the latest research by seminar lecturers provided in-full by the host organization. This included the Gen. Raymond E. Mason Jr. Distinguished Lecture on World War II: “Von Braun: In War, Peace, and History” with Michael Neufeld, PhD, of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.

  • An in-depth overview of international military history from colonial times to contemporary conflicts totaling nearly 100 hours, with an intensive course on the fundamentals of military history, from colonial warfare to modern conflict, with roughly one-third of that time focused on World War II led by historians of the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy.

  • Outside of the seminar sessions, these emerging historians who have recently entered the professional field were able to engage with one another and build relationships that will help the Fellows in the future and have been brought into the fold of the Museum’s own community of scholars.

2023 Summer Seminar in Military History

2023 Summer Seminar in Military History

From lessons learned over the two years of hosting this program, the Museum is excited about its latest offering of Scholar Enrichment Enterprises and professional development by offering its weeklong Faculty Seminar in WWII History in June 2024. For more information, please click here.

Summer Seminar Program Director

Dr. Bill Allison

Dr. Bill Allison is a scholar of American military history, specifically the Vietnam War. He is Professor of History at Georgia Southern University, joining the faculty there as Chair of the Department of History in 2008. During the 2002–2003 academic year, he was Visiting Professor in the Department of Strategy and International Security at the USAF Air War College and later served as Distinguished Professor of Military History at the USAF School for Advanced Air and Space Studies from 2010 to 2011. He also served two years as the General Harold K. Johnson Visiting Chair in Military History at the US Army War College (2012–2014).

He is author of The Gulf War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), Military Justice in Vietnam: The Rule of Law in an American War (University Press of Kansas, 2007), and American Diplomats in Russia: Case Studies in Orphan Diplomacy, 1917-1919 (Praeger, 1997), among others. He is a former Trustee and Vice President of the Society for Military History and has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Military History as well as editor for Routledge’s Critical Moments in American History series. He also co-hosts with Professor Brian Feltman of Georgia Southern University the podcast Military Historians are People, Too! Born and raised in Texas, he lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Summer Seminar Co-Director

Dr. Steph Hinnershitz

Dr. Steph Hinnershitz joined the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy as a Historian in June 2021. She received her PhD in American History in 2013 from the University of Maryland and specializes in the history of the Home Front during World War II. Her most recent book, Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor during World War II, was recently published with the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Program Associate Director

Dr. Beth Bailey

Dr. 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 12 books, including An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era; America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force; Managing Sex in the U.S. Military; and Beyond Pearl Harbor: A Pacific History. Professor Bailey was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2017, and in 2022 received the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society for Military History.

Program Associate Director

Dr. Robert Citino

Dr. Robert Citino is the Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian in the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy. Dr. Citino is an award-winning military historian and scholar who has published 10 books including The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943; Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942; and The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich; and numerous articles covering World War II and 20th-century military history. He speaks widely and contributes regularly to general readership magazines such as World War II. Dr. Citino enjoys close ties with the US military establishment, and taught one year at the US Military Academy at West Point and two years at the US Army War College.

Program Associate Director

Dr. Lorien Foote

Dr. Lorien Foote is the Patricia & Bookman Peters Professor in History at Texas A&M University. She is the author of four books, editor of three volumes, creator of a digital history project, and writer of numerous articles and essays on the military, cultural, and intellectual history of the American Civil War. In 2022, she was awarded the Organization of American Historians’ Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award for the most original book in the field.

Visiting Scholar

Dr. Vanya Eftimova Bellinger

Dr. Vanya Eftimova Bellinger is the author of Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (Oxford University Press USA, 2015). She earned a PhD in history at King’s College, London. Bellinger is the winner of the 2016 Society for Military History Moncado Prize for her article “The Other Clausewitz: Findings from the Newly Discovered Correspondence between Marie and Carl von Clausewitz.” Bellinger is the first scholar to work with the newly discovered correspondence between the Clausewitz couple. Before transitioning to academia, Bellinger worked as a journalist and international correspondent for various European outlets.

Visiting Scholar

Dr. David Kieran

Dr. David Kieran is the Col. Richard R. Hallock Distinguished Chair in Military History and Associate Professor of History at Columbus State University. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of five books, including Signature Wounds: The Untold Story of the Military’s Mental Health Crisis (NYU 2019); Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory (Massachusetts, 2014); At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (co-edited with Edwin A. Martini, Rutgers, 2018); and Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violence (co-edited with Rebecca A. Adelman, Minnesota 2020). He is currently writing a history of organizational change in the post-Vietnam US Army, How the Army Saved Itself: Maxwell R. Thurman and the Army’s Post-Vietnam Metamorphosis (Under contract, University of North Carolina Press).

Visiting Scholar

Dr. Michelle Moyd

Dr. Michelle Moyd is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa, published by Ohio University Press in 2014. Her published work has also appeared in International Labour and Working Class History and Radical History Review. She is currently working on Africa, Africans, and the First World War, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Visiting Scholar

Dr. Michael J. Neufeld

Dr. Michael J. Neufeld is a Senior Curator in the Space History Department of the National Air and Space Museum, where he is responsible for the early rocket collection and for Mercury and Gemini spacecraft. He has written or edited nine books, notably The Rocket and the Reich (1995) and Von Braun (2007). In 2017 Secretary David Skorton gave him the Smithsonian Distinguished Scholar Award, the Institution’s highest research award. Asteroid 329018 Neufeld is named for him.

Visiting Scholar

Dr. David Silbey

Dr. David Silbey is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Cornell University and Director of the Cornell in Washington program. He teaches courses on defense policy and military history and specializes in the industrialized total wars of the 20th century and asymmetric responses (guerrilla warfare, insurgency, and terrorism) to those wars that evolved after 1945. He has written multiple books, including The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, 1914-1916 (Taylor & Francis, 2005); A War of Empire and Frontier: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 (Hill & Wang, 2007); and The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China, 1900 (Hill & Wang, 2012). His latest book, The Other Face of Battle: America’s Forgotten Wars and the Experience of Combat, looks at how America struggles in wars other than conventional. Silbey is also the series editor for Cornell University Press’s “Battlegrounds: Cornell Studies in Military History.”

Visiting Scholar

Dr. David R. Stone

Dr. David R. Stone, the William E. Odom Professor of Russian Studies, joined the Strategy and Policy Department of the Naval War College in 2015. He received a BA from Wabash College and a PhD in history from Yale. He previously taught at Kansas State University and Hamilton College. His book Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union (2000) won the Shulman Prize of ASEEES and the Best First Book Prize of the Historical Society. He has also published A Military History of Russia (2006) and The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (2015). He edited The Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945 (2010) and the two-volume The Russian Civil War (2022). He is the author of several dozen articles on Russian military history and foreign policy.

Visiting Scholar

Dr. Harold Tanner

Dr. Harold Tanner, is Professor of History at the University of North Texas specializing in modern China. After graduating from New England College in 1983 and traveling extensively in China in 1984, Tanner earned an MA in East Asian Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 1985, a second BA in Modern Chinese from the Beijing Languages Institute in 1987, and his PhD in Modern Chinese History from Columbia University in 1994. His textbook China: A History (Hackett, 2009) has been adopted at more than 50 colleges and universities, including Johnson Community College, Kenyon College, and Brown University. Tanner’s most recent book, Where Chiang Kai-shek Lost China: The Liao-Shen Campaign, 1948 (Indiana University Press, 2015), focuses on the interaction of Chinese Communist and Nationalist forces on the ground in Manchuria and US diplomacy in Washington and Nanjing in one of the key military engagements of the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949). Tanner has done presentations on Chinese political and military history and strategic culture for audiences at the Hoover Institution, the Society for Military History, the US Army’s People’s Liberation Army Conference, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the US Seventh Fleet Naval Reserve, and the Air War College.