Peter Dennis AM
Emeritus Professor
Military History (Australian & Commonwealth)
Phone: +61 2 6268 8870
Fax: +61 2 6268 8879
Email: p.dennis@adfa.edu.au
Professional Background
Peter Dennis is a graduate of the University of Adelaide (BA Hons), Adelaide Teachers’ College (DipT), and Duke University (MA, PhD). He taught at The Royal Military College of Canada, 1969-79, before joining the Faculty of Military Studies, UNSW at RMC Duntroon, in 1979, and then transferring to the Australian Defence Force Academy in 1986. He has also been a Visiting Senior Fellow at The University of western Ontario, The University of Ulster, and the National University of Singapore. He was head of the School of History at UNSW@ADFA from 1989 to 1998. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and in 2003 was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for services to Australian military history.
He was founding editor of the journal WAR & SOCIETY from 1983 to 1988, and again served as editor from 1995 to 1999 and in 2005-2006.
His research interests span British and Australian military history. In British history he is the author of three books on aspects of defence and foreign policy: Decision by Default: Peacetime Conscription and British Defence, 1919-1939; The Territorial Army 1906-1940; and Troubled Days of Peace: Mountbatten and South East Asia Command, 1945-46. In Australian military history he jointly wrote and edited The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History, a second edition of which is now in preparation, and co-authored a volume in the official history of Australia’s involvements in Southeast Asian conflicts 1948-1975, Emergency and Confrontation: Australian military operations in Malaya and Borneo 1950-1966.
He has been associated with the annual Chief of Army Military History Conference from 1995 onwards, in particular as editor of the conference proceedings, which publish papers from invited speakers from Australia and overseas.
Since 1990 he has been involved in the creation of a comprehensive database of the 340,000 Australians who embarked for overseas service with the Australian Imperial Force, 1914-1918, and since 2004 in developing a similar database for the New Zealand Expeditionary Force.
Peter Dennis retired from UNSW in July 2006 and was made Emeritus Professor of the University. In July 2006 he took up a six-month appointment as Visiting Senior Fellow in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore.