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Associate Professor

Michael Finch

Associate Professor

Faculty of Arts and Education/Centre for Future Defence and National Security

Orcid identifier0000-0002-1259-5801
  • Associate Professor
    Faculty of Arts and Education/Centre for Future Defence and National Security
  • +61 3 522 78623 (Work)
  • Canberra - Centre for Defence

BIO

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 Aimee 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.

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY CURRENT APPOINTMENT

  • Associate Professor
    Deakin University, Centre for Future Defence and National Security

FIELDS OF RESEARCH (2020)

  • Historical studies
  • Political science

AREA/FACULTY

  • Faculty of Arts and Education

DEPARTMENT/SCHOOL/INSTITUTE

  • Centre for Future Defence and National Security