Bill Allison, PhD
Professor of History at Georgia Southern University
Bill Allison is a scholar of American military history and the American War in Vietnam and has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on both subjects for over twenty-five years. He is Professor of History at Georgia Southern University, joining the faculty there as Chair of the Department of History in 2008. After earning a BA and MA in History at East Texas State University in 1989 and 1991, he completed his PhD in History at Bowling Green State University in 1995. He then taught at the University of Saint Francis (Indiana) before joining the Department of History at Weber State University from 1999-2008. During 2002-2003, he was Visiting Professor in the Department of Strategy and International Security at the USAF Air War College. Allison later served as Distinguished Professor of Military History at the USAF School for Advanced Air and Space Studies from 2010-2011, where he was a staff ride leader for the Battle of Normandy. He completed two years as the General Harold K. Johnson Visiting Chair in Military History at the US Army War College (2012-2014), where he led numerous staff rides at Gettysburg and Antietam. Allison is the author of My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins University Press), Military Justice in Vietnam: The Rule of Law in an American War (University Press of Kansas), and The Tet Offensive (Routledge). His other work includes American Diplomats in Russia: Case Studies in Orphan Diplomacy, 1917-1919 (Praeger) and The Gulf War (Palgrave Macmillan), and he is co-author with Janet Valentine and the late Jeffery Grey of American Military History: A Survey from Colonial Times to the Present (now in 3rd edition, Taylor and Francis). In addition to recent essays on Vietnam War remembrance and commemoration, his current research includes book projects on the Tet Offensive and America in 1968. Allison has presented and lectured at numerous conferences and universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Zurich, the Australian Defence Force Academy, the US Army Heritage and Education Center, and the USAF Air Command & Staff College. He is a former Trustee and Vice-President of the Society for Military History and was awarded the Society’s Edwin Simmons Award for Distinguished Service. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Military History and is series editor for Critical Moments in American History (Routledge) and Modern War Studies at the University Press of Kansas. Allison served on the Department of the Army Historical Advisory Committee and was awarded the Army’s Outstanding Civilian Service Medal in 2014. With colleague Prof. Brian Feltman, he hosts the Military Historians are People, Too! podcast. Born and raised in Texas, Allison lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina, with his wife Jennifer (Registrar–Wofford College) and 7-year-old black lab Tucker.
