Michael W. Charney

I am Professor of Asian and Military History at SOAS, The University of London. My diversity of research and teaching interests owes much to the diversity of my postgraduate education, including M.A. degrees in Asian Studies at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Asian History at Ohio University (Athens), which included a minor in African history, and a PhD in History from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). I also owe much to my exposure to great, dynamic, and interesting supervisors and instructors during my undergraduate and postgraduate years at Ohio and Michigan, as well as great colleagues in the years following, both at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the National University of Singapore (1999-2001), where I was a postdoctoral research fellow for two years, in the Department of History here at SOAS (2001 to the present), and my time as Project Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Asia at the University of Tokyo (2012-2014). My three monographs include Southeast Asian Warfare, 1300-1900 (2004), Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma's Last Dynasty, 1752-1885 (2006), and A History of Modern Burma (2009). I am currently working on a history of railways in Africa and Asia, focusing in particular on the case studies of Ghana, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Japan.