Roger N. Buckley

 

roger2Professor of History and Founding Director

Wood Hall – Room 333
Phone: (860) 486 – 3560
Email: Roger.Buckley@uconn.edu

Roger Buckley is Professor of History and the founding Director of the Asian American Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut. He earned a Ph.D. in British Empire History at McGill University in Montreal. The focus of his research has been war in history. His writings have sought to demonstrate that the study of war is more than the study of conflict, as important as that is. War in history embraces war in all its various aspects: social, cultural, geographical, medical, economic, gender, legal, intellectual, and political as much as purely military.

He has received several major research awards, among them grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Carter Brown Library Fellowship/Brown University, the Sir William Osler Medical Library Fellowship McGill University, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the University of Connecticut Provost Research Fellowship.

His scholarly books and articles have been published in the U.S., the Netherlands, the U.K., India, Puerto Rico, St. Kitts, and Jamaica. His books include Slaves in Red Coats (Yale University Press, 1979), and The British Army in the West Indies (University Press of Florida/University Press of the West Indies, 1998). His most recent book, to be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2013, is Yellow Power, Yellow Soul: The Radical Art of Fred Ho, an anthology on Fred Ho, which he co-edited with Dr. Tamara Roberts of the University of California –Berkeley.

He has recently completed a trilogy that examines the issue of race, culture, gender and national identity in the British colonial army of the 19th century through the medium of literary historical fiction. His “Accommodation and Resistance: Three Who Chose Rebellion” trilogy examines the lives of three historical characters who served in the British Army in the Caribbean, India, and Ireland. Congo Jack was published by Pinto Press in 1997, I, Hanuman was published by the Writers Workshop in 2003 in India, while The Death and Life of an Irish Soldier was published by the University Press of the South in 2008. The trilogy was the subject of scholarly papers which were presented by Dr. Angelika Maeser-Lemieux at two of Canada’s major academic conferences. In the panel on Gender and Change in Transnational Context, which was part of the March-April 2011 annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Dr. Maeser-Lemieux’s paper was “Deconstructing the Colonial Masculine Identity in the Trilogy – Accommodation and Resistance: Three Chose Rebellion .” In May 2011, at the Commonwealth Literature Association annual conference, which was held at the University of New Brunswick, she presented a paper titled “The Intersection of Nation, Gender, Class and Race in Congo Jack.” Continuing his interest in historical fiction, Buckley recently completed Singh’s Choice, a novel which examines the service of several thousand British Indian soldiers in the German Army during the Second World War.

Buckley is currently at work on a book-length history of Montreal’s Japanese Canadian community. McGill-Queen’s University Press has asked for reading privileges of the completed manuscript.

In his spare time he is writing a series of detective/mystery/speculative novels in which the genre is used as a vehicle to explore current moral, cultural and political issues. The central character in each is someone we have not seen before: a Canadian university professor who moonlights as a detective. Gandhi Forever, the first novel in the Relph Coggins Series, was published in February 2012 as an e-book with Amazon.com. His scholarly research and training informs all of his works of fiction.

Buckley continues his long association with Windham High School (Connecticut), where he is a frequent speaker on a variety of subjects including Writing Historical Fiction and India.