|
| Research Interests for Alex Roland
Research Interests:
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. - 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.
- Recent 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.)
|
