In my other life, I’m a history prof. Writing is my first love, but I teach too. Actually that pays the bills more than the books do. Anyway, though I don’t write much about my teaching, I’ll make an exception here. Just a few days ago, my employer — Wright State University — just approved something I’ve been thinking about creating for a long time now: a graduate program in military history, broadly defined. We’ve actually had a grad program in history for some time now. I was director of it a while back, while I was writing Drillmaster and Whites of Their Eyes in fact. Not a huge program, offering just the MA, and focused mostly on public history. I thought that, given the intensity of interest in military topics, a redirection of the non-public-history portion of our graduate program might breathe new life into it. We’ll see. Nothin’ to lose, either way.
Still, exciting stuff. I’m in the process of lining up a few friends of mine, mostly authors who have written about war-related topics and have significant popular history creds, to start a lecture series with a broad appeal outside of academia. Best of all (at least I think it’s best of all)–we’re planning a centennial commemoration of WWI that should be very interesting. Not an academic conference. It seems that every history department in Europe and North America is planning some sort of academic conference about WWI between 2014 and 2018. No, not that. Something much bigger. I won’t reveal that just yet, though. And that’s self-serving, too, because (giveaway here, drumroll please, because I’m sure everyone is simply dying to know what I’m going to write about next) my next book is going to be set in WWI.
More details on the next book later.
If you’re interested — out of simple curiosity, or out of professional interest in Wright State — you can follow along on my other blog, Bellum et historia.
More anon…
One-Shilling Verses 