LTC Brian Drohan
Associate Professor
Division Chief, International History
History & War Studies
LTC Brian Drohan is an Academy Professor in the Department of History & War Studies at West Point, where he specializes in 20th century international and military history. He led an armor platoon in Iraq with the 1st Infantry Division; deployed twice to the U.S. Embassy to Sri Lanka in support of Special Operations Command – Pacific; and served as a strategist at the Eighth Army headquarters in the Republic of Korea.
Ph.D. – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
M.A. – University of Pennsylvania
B.A. – University of Pennsylvania
Research Interests
International History (diplomacy, international organizations and institutions, humanitarianism, human rights), Military History, Imperialism and decolonization, Cold War
Selected Publications
Imjin River 1951: Last Stand of the ‘Glorious Glosters’ (Osprey Publishing, 2018).
Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Cornell University Press, 2017).
“U.S. Military Humanitarianism and the United Nations,” Modern American History 7, no. 1 (2024): 103-108.
“The Battle for Manila, February-March 1945: Balancing Force Protection and Civilian Casualties,” Urban Battlefields: Lessons Learned from World War II to the Modern Era, ed. Gregory Fremont-Barnes (Naval Institute Press, 2024), 138-171.
“Retaining Flexibility: Dag Hammarskjöld, the 1958 Summary Study, and the History of UN Peacekeeping,” Global Governance 29, no. 2 (2023): 119-135.
“Sinning Quietly: Law and Human Rights in British Colonial Counter-Insurgency,” The Oxford Handbook of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, eds. Gareth Curless and Martin Thomas (Oxford University Press, 2023), 234-53.