MCSS Staff

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MCSS STAFF

Staff Profiles

Ian J. Bickerton (Ph.D.) - Director.

Associate Professor Ian Bickerton has been a member of the School of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia for the past thirty five years.

During that time he has taught the history of the modern USA, modern China and Japan, the history of US foreign relations, and the history of the Arab Israeli Conflict at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

He has taught at a number of Universities in the United States and has been a visiting scholar at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (Washington, DC) and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in Oxford, UK.

He has published extensively on US foreign relations (with China, and the Middle East) and the Arab-Israeli conflict. He has given numerous papers at international conferences and universities in the United States, Europe, Israel and Australia. He is a frequent commentator on Australian media.

Bickerton is committed to the idea of exchanging ideas and broadening the debate about today's important strategic issues among interested parties and it is his hope that the Malmsbury Center for Strategic Studies can become an important vehicle in that process.

Kenneth J. Hagan (Ph.D.) - Director.

Kenneth J. Hagan is a professor and museum director emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy. He recently has taught "Strategy and Policy, the American Experience" for the U.S. Naval War College, and he has offered an advanced seminar on maritime strategy and history at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

Early in his academic career he taught at the University of California, Irvine, and at Claremont Men's College in California. While on the history faculty of Kansas State University during the Vietnam War he conducted a special weekly seminar on American foreign relations for mid-career officers at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth

For over twenty-five years he has directed curriculum development and instructor training in naval history for the national college-level Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC). During the past decade he has annually lectured on American naval strategy at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto.

He has lectured several times at the Swedish Armed Forces Command and Staff College in Stockholm, and he has presented papers on American naval history and strategy before international gatherings of military and naval historians in Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Spain and Canada.

The author of a comprehensive one-volume history of the American navy, he has edited an anthology tracing American naval strategy and operations from the American Revolution to the 1980s, and he is a co-author of a leading textbook on the history of American foreign relations.

A retired captain in the U.S. Naval Reserves, he his made a lifetime study of the historic relationship between American foreign policy and naval strategy. He is convinced that the study of this relationship can illuminate current events and offer cautionary guidelines for the future.

He seeks to challenge the prevalent and facile acceptance of the Clausewitz doctrine that war is simply a continuation of policy and to make the contrary argument that armed conflict between nations increasingly constitutes a potentially catastrophic collapse of policy making.

Hagan hopes that through conferences and other means of exchanging ideas the Malmsbury Centre for Strategic Studies will contribute to a dialogue persuading policy makers to be extremely reluctant to resort to force as a means of settling international crises and disputes.

Last updated 5/6/07