I've recently given some thought to my future pursuits in grad school and have come to the conclusion that I am interested in military history. I recently messaged a few flared members and moderators regarding this question and was told to make a post, so here it is. I, essentially, would like to know what schools have the best programs in the field, and if there are any particular professors which are well known. My particular interest is in the ancient world, that is, the militaries of ancient Greece and Rome. I have not yet thought of a particular thesis which I would like to pursue but am in the process of doing so. I am just looking for schools and profs at this point. I am located in Canada but would have no problem at all with going to the states. I am currently undertaking a double major in the liberal arts and classics. The classics program I am in emphasizes archeology and history rather than linguistics.
As a side not, I was wondering if it is possible to include archeology with military history. Is there a way to study the archeology of war?
Thank you for any help or advice
When I looked into a military history masters program prior to starting my degree, I found this site: http://www.smh-hq.org/grad/gradguide/degree.html It gives a list of schools, POCs and the specialties for the professors there. Good luck!
If you wanted to study the late Roman empire / late antiquity, Guy Halsall (Warfare and Society in the barbarian west) has done good work using a combination of textual and archaeological sources and could be a good person to consider applying to work with. He's in the history department at the university of york (uk). He's a very good supervisor by all accounts, and has been nothing but supportive to graduate students in the few years I've known him. You can get a sense of his views on history, archaeology, and good (and bad) ways of studying the archaeology of war on his blog. He's expressed a lot of doubts about the usefulness of battlefield archaeology, but has argued that we can learn a lot about the lives of people in the past by studying warfare in its wider context.
A word of warning. I have a MA in military history and switched to social/intellectual history for my PhD. There are no college teaching positions for military history anymore. If you go to higheredjobs.com and search the listings you will see what I mean.
I did a module on Battlefield Archaeology as part of my Archaeology degree in the UK and the professor had been doing that topic (albeit mostly medieval) for most of his career so there are definitely options out there.