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| Alex Roland, Professor Emeritus
- Contact Info:
| Office Location: | | | Email Address: |   | - Education:
| PhD | Duke University | 1974 |
| MA | University of Hawaii | 1970 |
| BS | United States Naval Academy | 1966 |
- 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
(More Publications)
- with Raymond Ashley, Jeffrey Bolster, Alexander Keyssar, and David Sicilia, A Maritime History of the United States
(2003)
- with Philip Shiman, Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983-1993
(2002), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
- Understanding War, edited by Richard H. Kohn and Alex Roland
(2002) (includes introduction co-authored with Kohn,
and chapter entitled "Technology and War".)
- The Military-industrial Complex
(2001), Washington: American Historical Association
- 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 |