Alex Roland, Professor Emeritus

Office Location:  
Email Address: send me a message

Education:

PhDDuke University1974
MAUniversity of Hawaii1970
BSUnited States Naval Academy1966
Research Interests:

Current projects: Separate from my scholarship and teaching, I am a student and critic of the United States civilian space program. I spent eight stimulating and rewarding years (1973-1981) as a historian with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but I have come to believe that the agency lost its way after the Apollo program. I have written extensively on this topic. My other extracurricular activities include running, tennis, mystery and historical novels, and occasional sailing when I can find my way to the sea.

I study military history and the history of technology. My focus has ranged over all of Western experience, and I have recently converted my undergraduate course in military history to a comparative world military history course. I have written about chariots in the second millennium B.C., Greek fire in medieval Byzantium, and computers and aerospace technology in the twentieth century. While I study the history of technology in general, I also focus on the ways in which technology has shaped war and war has altered technology.

Recent Publications

  1. with Raymond Ashley, Jeffrey Bolster, Alexander Keyssar, and David Sicilia, A Maritime History of the United States (2003)
  2. with Philip Shiman, Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983-1993 (2002), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
  3. Understanding War, edited by Richard H. Kohn and Alex Roland (2002) (includes introduction co-authored with Kohn, and chapter entitled "Technology and War".)
  4. The Military-industrial Complex (2001), Washington: American Historical Association
  5. Atmospheric Flight in the Twentieth Century, edited by Peter Galison and Alex Roland (2000), Dordrecht, Ned.: Kluwer (paperback ed. 2001.)

Harold K. Johnson Professor of Military History, Military History Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1988-1989 Fellow, Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994-1995 Dr. Leo Shifrin Professor of Naval-Military History, U.S. Naval Academy, 2001-2002