Michael J Riley

Michael Riley is a child of the Cold War, having celebrated his first birthday one October day during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a schoolboy, he and his classmates practiced the era’s duck and cover drills, and grew up fearing an imminent attack with little real understanding of what that meant. It meant only fear and a vague sense of a brutal, cartoonish enemy that sought to wipe us out.

Growing up during the Sixties and the Seventies, he was immersed in the popular culture that surrounded the Bomb, including kitsch and other cultural forms that often trivialized the issue. Eventually he gained a deepened understanding of the complexities of the era — a theme he continues to explore today along with other issues in contemporary global security, including American political extremism, and social and cultural analysis.

He is a retired member of the general faculty of the University of Arizona, where he was stationed at the Arizona State Museum. Currently he works for the Department of Homeland Security, playing a small part in our nation’s counterterrorism efforts. He holds a Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Graduate Certificate in International Security Studies from the University of Arizona.