Chair: Professor Brian Bond, King’s College, London

Nikolas Gardner (Associate Professor of Strategy, Department of Strategy and Leadership, Air Way College, Alabama, USA)
Charles Townshend's Advance on Baghdad: The British Offensive in b, September-November 1915

Nikolas Gardner holds a PhD in military history and strategic studies from the University of Calgary. He has taught at Mount Royal College, in Calgary and the University of Salford, in Greater Manchester. He is currently Associate Professor of Strategy at the Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. Dr. Gardner is the author of Trial by Fire: Command and the British Expeditionary Force in 1914, (Praeger, 2003), and articles in a variety of journals including The Journal of Contemporary History, War in History, War & Society, and The Journal of Military History. He has served on the Council of the Army Records Society, and as Reviews Editor of the Journal of the Society of Army Historical Research. In September 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Meighen McCrae (Doctoral Student, University of Oxford)The Supreme War Council’s Inter-allied War Planning for 1919

Originally from Algonquin, Ontario, Meighen McCrae completed her undergraduate degree at Carleton University with a major in History and a minor in English Literature. In 2007 she completed her Master’s thesis entitled, Strategy and Science Fiction: Britain and the Invasion Scares, 1905-1909 at the University of Calgary. This thesis, supervised by Dr. John Ferris, assessed the similarities in the visions promulgated by strategic publicists and science fiction writers in their attempts to raise concerns over national defence with the objective of affecting government policy. In October 2009 she began to read for her DPhil at the University of Oxford. Her current research focuses on the Supreme War Council and their strategic forecasting and inter-allied war planning for campaigns in 1919-1920.

Peter Jackson (Reader in International History, Aberystwyth University)Contending Conceptions of Security in French Policy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919

Peter Jackson is a Reader in International History at Aberystwyth University. He is also editor of Intelligence and National Security, the world's leading academic journal in the field of intelligence and international relations. He has written widely on the subjects of French foreign and security policy in the era of the two World Wars, intelligence and uncertainty and the role of intelligence in British policy before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He holds an MA from the University of Calgary and a PhD from the University of Cambridge.