Alex Roland

Alex Roland is Professor of History Emeritus at Duke University, where he taught Military History and the History of Technology. A 1966 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Professor Roland served in the Marine Corps before taking his PhD in History at Duke in 1974. From 1973 to 1981 he was a historian with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. After returning to Duke in 1981, he chaired the Department of History (1995-2000) and held the Harold K. Johnson Chair of Military History at the Military History Institute, U.S. Army War College, and the Dr. Leo Shifrin Chair of Naval-Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy. His books include Underwater Warfare in the Age of Sail (1978), Model Research: The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 1915-1958 (1985), The Military Industrial Complex (2001), with Richard Preston and Sidney Wise, Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and Its Interrelationships with Western Society (5th ed., 1991), with Philip Shiman, Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983-1993 (2002), and with W. Jeffrey Bolster and Alexander Keyssar, The Way of the Ship: America’s Maritime History Reenvisioned, 1600-2000 (2008). He has edited A Spacefaring People (1985) and, with Peter Galison, Atmospheric Flight in the Twentieth Century (2000). He is a past President of the Society for the History of Technology and Vice President of the Society for Military History.