History & Art History

Christopher Hamner specializes in the social dimensions of U.S. military history. An honors graduate of Dartmouth College, he received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 2004. His dissertation explores the changes in individual soldiers’ experiences in combat and the factors that motivated them to continue fighting as warfare became progressively more industrialized. He has been a fellow at Harvard University’s John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the U.S. Army’s Center for Military History, and taught at Duke University and Appalachian State University in North Carolina before coming to George Mason University in 2005. He is currently at work on a monograph that examines the individual experience of combat and combat motivation from the eighteenth century to the post-industrial, irregular battlefield.

Military history, individual experience of battle, combat motivation