Dr Michael Finch

Michael Finch is a Senior Lecturer in the History of War and Strategy at the Centre for Future Defence and National Security. Prior to this he was a Senior Lecturer at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, a Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London, and the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of War at the University of Oxford. He has taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Birmingham, and the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the United Kingdom, as well as Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul, South Korea. He obtained a DPhil in Modern History from the University of Oxford, and also holds a Postgraduate Certificate of Academic Practice in Higher Education from King’s College London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Mike’s research spans multiple aspects of the history of war and strategy, including military and strategic thought, the theory and practice of imperial warfare, and the intellectual history of military history. His book, A Progressive Occupation? The Gallieni-Lyautey Method and Colonial Pacification in Tonkin and Madagascar, 1885-1900 (Oxford University Press, 2013) examined the emergence of a method for the consolidation of imperial conquests against the record of the pacification processes which took place in Tonkin and Madagascar at the end of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it shed new light on the theory and practice – and the gap between the two – of a strand of imperial military thought often considered a key precursor to modern counterinsurgency doctrine.

His forthcoming book with Oxford University Press, Making Makers: the past, the present, and the study of war presents a comprehensive history of a seminal work of scholarship on war and strategy, Makers of Modern Strategy, exploring the manner in which it was made and re-made across the course of the twentieth century. It focuses on the various attempts to devise versions of the work from the 1940s to the 1980s, the intellectual biographies of the scholars who were most central to those efforts, and the legacy of the work they undertook, building a nuanced appraisal of the development of scholarship on war, with a particular emphasis on military history and the central role of historians in relation to the adjacent disciplines of strategic and security studies.

He is also the co-editor, with Aimée Fox and David Morgan-Owen, of the forthcoming University Press of Kansas volume Framing the First World War: Knowledge, Learning, and Military Thought.

In addition to these projects, Mike has published widely in journals such as War in History, The Journal of Military History, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, The British Journal of Military History, and 20 & 21. Revue d’Histoire.