Brian DeToy

Brian DeToy is a retired US Army officer and former Academy Professor and Director of the Defense & Strategic Studies program at the United States Military Academy, West Point from 2007-13. His immediate previous assignments were as Assistant Professor in the Academy’s History Department, Chief of Research and Publications in the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Professor of Military Science at the University of Kansas. DeToy graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a BA in History in 1985 and received MA and PhD degrees in History from Florida State University. He has taught at the United States Military Academy, the University of Kansas and for the University of Maryland’s University Campus. He has presented papers and chaired and commented sessions at numerous conferences both in the United States and Europe. His research focuses on British naval policy and operations and their intersection with politics in the era of the American and French Revolutions and into the Napoleonic Age conflicts. Specifically, he has examined the naval and political career of Admiral Sir George Cranfield Berkeley as a vehicle to probe the larger field. DeToy has also appeared on numerous television programs on A&E, Discovery, PBS, History Channel and others, on topics of military and social history. From October 2009 to March 2010, he served as the Command Historian for the main warfighting headquarters in Iraq, Multi-National Corps – Iraq. Here, he oversaw five teams of historians embedded in subordinate units across the battlespace, as well as personally directing historical operations in the headquarters, collecting the material that future historians will use in their assessments. In his post-military career, DeToy and his wife, Sheryl, have built a travel company, Essential History Expeditions, and led numerous groups to visit battlefields and tour historic cities and other sites, from the beaches of Normandy and Cuba to the cities and jungles of Vietnam; from the Battle of the Bulge to South Africa and many sites of the American Revolution and Civil War, and more. In addition, DeToy is engaged in numerous writing projects – travel, fiction and non-fiction.

Dr. DeToy's Curriculum Vitae can be found here.