About Us, Staff, Associates, Students, LCMSDS Mandate

The purpose of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies is to foster research, teaching, and public discussion of historical and contemporary military and strategic issues. The Centre was founded in 1991 with support from the Military and Strategic Studies programme (now the Security and Defence Forum) of Canada's Department of National Defence.  The research activities of the Centre are multi-disciplinary, with concentrations on military history and the strategic analysis of defence operations and peacekeeping.

LCMSDS has an extensive publications program, specializing in books and reports on various aspects of Canada's military history and on contemporary strategic questions. The Centre publishes Canadian Military History, a quarterly journal-in-a-magazine format. The consistently high quality of CMH, in both content and production, has enabled it to grow rapidly in size and circulation.

Among the Centre's greatest resources is the Canadian World War II Air Photo Collection, consisting of approximately 300,000 air photos taken by RCAF units in Europe during 1942-44. LCMSDS also houses the "No Price Too High" Archive, The Ronnie Shepherd Military Operational Research Archive, the Robert Vogel Library, and more than a dozen other archival collections. The Centre makes these collections and archives available to researchers, students, and other interested parties both online and in our library.

The Centre also supports classroom teaching and educational programs at Wilfrid Laurier University in History (military history), Political Science (international relations), and Mathematics (game theory). The Centre also provides specialized equipment and resources for the use of students and instructors.

The Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies has an extensive program of conferences, workshops, invited speakers and seminars covering the military history of Canada as well as national and international issues related to military operations and strategy. LCMSDS publishes books and reports on these issues on an occasional basis.

LCMSDS Director / Professor Emeritus Wilfrid Laurier University 

Terry Copp's recent publications include Cinderella Army: The Canadians in Northwest Europe (UTP, 2006) and Fields of Fire: The Canadians in Normandy (UTP, 2003). His Paper "Towards a New Balance Sheet: 21 Army Group in Normandy" published in John Buckley (ed.) Normandy Sixty Years On (Frank Cass, 2006) extends his revisionist approach to military history to the British army in the Second World War. The Canadian Defence Academy commissioned Guy Simonds and the Art of Command for publication in early 2007 and Combat Stress in the 20th Century: The Commonwealth Experience for 2010, coauthored with Mark Humphries. Terry also authored No Price Too High: Canadians and the Second World War which lead to the acclaimed television series No Price Too High where he was the lead military historian.

TEL: 519 884 0710 ex. 3309

FAX: 519 886 5057

tcopp@wlu.ca

Editor-in-Chief, Canadian Military History / Research Director: Naval and Military

Faculty Associate

Roger Sarty became interested in maritime history during his childhood in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he accompanied his father, a television producer, on research trips for historical documentaries.  After studies at the University of Toronto (BA and PhD) and Duke University (MA), he joined the Directorate of History at National Defence Headquarters in 1981.  He worked as a specialist in maritime aviation during the Second World War on the official history of the Royal Canadian Air Force, and then in 1987 became a founding member of the team established to produce a new operational history of the Royal Canadian Navy.  From 1991 he was Senior Historian at the Directorate, with responsibility for all English-language publications, and in 1998 moved to the Canadian War Museum.  As Deputy Director, in 2000-2003 he headed exhibition and public programming development for the war museum’s new building on LeBreton Flats in Ottawa.  In 2004 Dr. Sarty became a professor of military and Canadian history at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario.  He has authored, co-authored or edited eleven books and monographs, and in addition to CMH also edits The Northern Mariner.

Faculty Associate

WLU Profile

519 884 0710 ex. 2287

rsarty@wlu.ca

Professor of Mathematics at Wilfrid Laurier University, Adjunct Professor of Systems Engineering at the University of Waterloo and Research Director: Conflict Analysis at LCMSDS

Faculty Associate

D. Marc Kilgour is Professor of Mathematics at Wilfrid Laurier University and Adjunct Professor of Systems Engineering at University of Waterloo. At LCMSDS, he holds the position of Research Director: Conflict Analysis. His research crosses many fields, but is usually concerned with optimal decision-making and its consequences. He has built and analyzed mathematical models of strategy in deterrence, escalation, power-sharing, negotiation, voting, arms control, peace operations, and counter-terrorism. He is co-author or co-editor of six books, including Perfect Deterrence (2000) and the Handbook of Group Decision and Negotiation (2010).

WLU Profile

TEL: 519 884 0710 ex. 4208

FAX: 519 886 5057

mkilgour@wlu.ca

Associate Professor, University of Waterloo

Faculty Associate

Geoff Hayes is an Associate professor of History at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of the The Lincs: A History of the Lincoln and Welland Regiment (1986,2007) and Waterloo County: An Illustrated History (1997). With Andrew Iarocci and Mike Bechthold, Hayes is the editor of Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment (2007).

UW Profile

519 888 4567 ex. 35138

ghayes@artsmail.uwaterloo.ca

Jonathan Vance holds the Canada Research Chair in Conflict and Culture in the Department of History at The University of Western Ontario.

Faculty Associate

His books and articles include Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (1997), High Flight: Aviation and the Canadian Imagination (2002), A Gallant Company: The True Story of "The Great Escape" (2003), Building Canada: People and Projects that Shaped the Nation (2006), Unlikely Soldiers: How Two Canadians Fought the Secret War against Nazi Occupation (2008), and Bamboo Cage: The POW Diary of Flight Lieutenant Robert Wyse, 1942-43 (2009). He is currently exploring a new project on regional enlistment rates in Canada during the Great War. Jonathan edits the book review supplement for Canadian Military History.

UWO Profile

jvance@uwo.ca

Associate Professor and Chair, Department of History, St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo 

Faculty Associate

P. Whitney Lackenbauer specializes in Canadian military and diplomatic history, Arctic sovereignty and security issues, and civil-military relations. His recent books include The Canadian Forces & Arctic Sovereignty: Debating Roles, Interests, and Requirements, 1968-1974 (edited with peter Kikkert, 2010), A Commemorative History of Aboriginal Peoples in the Canadian Military (with John Moses, Scott Sheffield, and Maxime Gohier, 2009), Arctic Front: Defending Canada in the Far North (with Ken Coates, Bill Morrison, and Greg Poelzer, 2008) (winner of the 2009 Donner Prize for the best book on Canadian public policy), Battle Grounds: The Canadian Military and Aboriginal Lands (2007), Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian Military: Historical Perspectives (edited with Craig Mantle, 2007), and Kurt Meyer on Trial: A Documentary Record (edited with Chris Madsen, 2007).  

His current research includes studies of the Canadian Rangers, the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, modernization in the Cold War Arctic, Aboriginal blockades and occupations, and Aboriginal-military relations in British settler societies. 

University of Waterloo Profile

Whitney's Personal Website

TEL: 519 884 8110 ex. 28233
FAX: 519 884 5759

pwlacken@watarts.uwaterloo.ca

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science at Wilfrid Laurier University

Faculty Associate 

Dr. Edgar currently is serving as executive director of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS), located at Wilfrid Laurier University. His research and teaching interests include conflict resolution and post-conflict peacebuilding, global defence industry and defense trade issues, and the intersection between international politics and international law.

WLU Profile

519 884 0710 ex. 2728

aedgar@wlu.ca

Faculty Associate

Mark Humphries specializes in the social history of Canadian medicine and war and society in the era of the First World War. He has published articles on traumatized veterans, shell shock, the 1918 influenza pandemic, and the Canadian experience overseas during the Great War in the Canadian Historical Review, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, War & Society, and several edited collections for UBC Press and WLU Press. His books include The Selected Papers of Sir Arthur Currie: Diaries, Letters, and Report to the Ministry, 1917–1933 and Combat Stress in the 20th Century: the Commonwealth Experience, co-authored with Terry Copp.

Mark’s first monograph will be published by the University of Toronto press in 2011 as The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health which examines how the 1918 influenza pandemic and the experience of war shaped governmentalities of public health in Canada between 1832 and 1920. He is also co-editor with John Maker of a series of translations from the German official history of the Great War, Der Weltkrieg, 1914 bis 1918, the first volume of which is titled Germany’s Western Front: Translations from the German Official History of the Great War, 1915. The next volume in the series, examining the outbreak of war in 1914, will be published in the autumn of 2011.

Mark is currently writing his second monograph on shell shock and its legacy for traumatized veterans of the First World War while beginning a survey of the social history of Canadian medicine from contact to the present for Oxford University Press. He teaches Canadian social, medical, and military history at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta.

Mount Royal University Research Profile 

TEL: 403 440 6760

FAX: 403 440 6659

mhumphries@mtroyal.ca

Communications Director / Managing Editor, Canadian Military History

Mike Bechthold is the managing editor of Canadian Military History and the Communications Director of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies. He teaches military history at Wilfrid Laurier University and has published many articles on the First and Second World War.  He is the co-editor of a collection of essays on the Battle of Vimy Ridge entitled, Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment (WLU Press, 2007).

TEL: 519 884 0710 ex. 4594

FAX: 519 886 5057

mbechthold@wlu.ca