Program Directors
PROGRAM DIRECTOR
DR. BILL ALLISON is Professor of Military History at Georgia Southern University, where he teaches courses on American military history, war and society, and the Vietnam War. He has held visiting professorships at the Air War and the School for Advanced Air and Space Studies, and was the Harold K. Johnson Chair in Military History at the US Army War College. Allison is author of The Gulf War, My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War, and Military Justice in Vietnam: The Rule of Law in an American War, among others. He is a former Trustee and Vice President of the Society for Military History and edits Modern War Studies at the University Press of Kansas. Allison also co-hosts the podcast Military Historians are People, Too!
ASSOCIATE PROGRAM DIRECTORS
DR. SUSANNAH J. URAL is the Frank and Virginia Williams Chair for Abraham Lincoln and Civil War Studies at Mississippi State University. Her books include Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit, Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades: Soldiers and Families in America’s Civil War, and The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861-1865. Ural has been a member of the Society for Military History's Board of Trustees and is a former chair of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Military History. She serves on the Editorial Board of the journal War & Society and is co-Director of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project.
DR. JENNIFER KEENE is Professor of History and Dean of Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University. A specialist in the American military experience during the First World War, Keene’s books include Doughboys, the Great War and the Remaking of America, World War I: The American Soldier Experience, and The United States and the First World War, among other works. She served as an associate editor for the Encyclopedia of War and American Society, which won the Society of Military History’s prize for best military history reference book. She is also a general editor for the “1914-1918-online,” a peer-reviewed online digital humanities project. She served as President of the Society of Military History from 2018-2019.
DR. DAVID KIERAN is the Col. Richard R. Hallock Distinguished Chair in Military History and Associate Professor of History at Columbus State University, where he teaches courses on the Vietnam War and military history. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of five books, including Signature Wounds: The Untold Story of the Military’s Mental Health Crisis, Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory, At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (co-edited with Edwin A. Martini); and Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violence (co-edited with Rebecca A. Adelman). Kieran is writing a history of organizational change in the post-Vietnam US Army titled How the Army Saved Itself: Maxwell R. Thurman and the Army’s Post-Vietnam Metamorphosis.