Kyle F. Zelner
Associate Professor
PhD, William and Mary, 2003
Liberal Arts Building 462
601-266-6196
kyle.zelner@usm.edu
Dr. Zelner teaches courses in the history of colonial and Revolutionary America, early American war and society, and history methods and writing. He is the department’s Director of Graduate Studies and is a member of the College Council of the College of Arts and Letters. In addition, Zelner is a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of War & Society at Southern Miss and is on the program committee for the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Society for Military History. He also routinely participates as an instructor for Teaching American History grant programs which aim to bring the latest historical scholarship to high school teachers throughout the United States. Zelner also sits on the Advisory Council of Historians and Scholars for the American Institute for History Education, one of the country’s leading institutions supporting K-12 history education.
Dr. Zelner’s book A Rabble in Arms: Massachusetts Towns and Militiamen during King Philip’s War was published in 2009 as the inaugural volume in a new series Warfare and Culture by New York University Press. The study examines the social background of impressed soldiers during King Philip’s War and the government system which impressed them; he argues that the conventional wisdom about a broadly democratic militia in seventeenth century colonial America is largely false. The book has received favorable reviews in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Military History, the New England Quarterly, Choice, and on H-War. Zelner has presented his research at number of professional conferences, including meetings of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Society of Military History, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Watchman Center, the Great Lakes Historical Society, and the American Historical Association, as well as speaking at the International Historical Miniature Gaming Society’s War College. His other publications include an article in the New England Quarterly; contributions to the Encyclopedia of North American Colonial American Warfare to 1775, the Encyclopedia of American War Literature, and the Encyclopedia of U.S. Military History; and book reviews for the New England Quarterly, The Journal of Southern History, and the Journal of Military History. He is currently working on an edited volume which will explore the social history of the American soldier from 1607 to present and an article about Captain Samuel Mosley, a then-(in)famous and now all-but-forgotten officer in seventeenth-century New England.
Department of History
http://www.usm.edu/history
601.266.4333 • history@usm.edu