Dr Aimée Fox is an historian of warfare and is currently Director of Postgraduate Research (DRSC chair) in the Defence Studies Department. Her research focuses on warfare in the twentieth century and explores how military organisations innovate and change in historic and contemporary contexts.

In 2016, Aimée joined King’s from the Department of History at the University of Birmingham where she also completed her AHRC-funded doctorate on innovation and change in the British Army of the First World War.

Aimée is a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy. She currently sits on the Editorial Advisory Board of British Journal for Military History and International Journal for Military History and Historiography. She was a former editorial board member for Journal of Military History (2020–21) and Journal of Advanced Military Studies (2021–24). She is an elected Trustee of the Society for Military History and also serves on the National Army Museum’s research and collections advisory panel. Aimée has held fellowships with the Australian Defence Force Academy, Australian War Memorial, Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare at Marine Corps University, Deakin University, and the Royal British Legion. She co-edits two academic book series: War and the British Empire (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and History of Warfare (Brill).

 

Research Interests

Aimée’s primary research interests focus on the British armed forces in the era of the First World War (c.1899–1923). Her first major research project explored how armed forces—both historic and modern—accommodate and respond to change, along with the frictions associated with the movement of expertise, experience, and knowledge between and within organisations as well as across geographical boundaries.

She is currently pursuing two research projects: first, an exploration of gossip as a form of military knowledge and its relationship to organisational learning, sense-making, and small unit dynamics in armed forces; and secondly, a collective biography of a social network (or ‘world’) in the era of the First World War. Using the ‘small history’ of this world—whose members were intimately involved in military, political, royal, and literary circles—the project explores several themes, such as ideologies of reform and ‘efficiency’, notions of self-improvement, attitudes towards empire and imperialism, intimacy, and the under-rated role of women in public affairs.

Her broader research interests are listed below

• Social and military history of the First World War
• Military innovation and adaptation in historic contexts
• Learning and change in military organisations
• Social and military history of the British and Commonwealth armed forces, 1865–1939
• Military families in the British and Commonwealth armed forces in the early twentieth century

 

PhD Supervision

Dr Fox is currently accepting new PhD students in the above areas. Please note that proposals should be primarily historical in approach and methodology.

 

Selected Publications

Book

The Military Papers and Correspondence of Major General Guy Dawnay, 1915–1919 (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) 444pp ISBN: 9781838387723

Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) 289pp ISBN: 9781107190795

• Winner, 2018 Templer Medal for Best First Book
• Winner, 2018 British Army Military Book of the Year

Research articles

(with D. G. Morgan-Owen and H. C. Bennett) ‘A haunting past: British Defence, historical narratives, and the politics of presentism’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 37, no. 4 (2024), pp. 520–545

(With D. G. Morgan-Owen and A. Gould) ‘Sources of military change: Emulation, politics, and concept development in UK Defence’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 26, no. 3 (2024), pp. 864–885

‘“I have never felt more utterly yours”: Presence, intimacy, and long-distance marriages in the First World War’, Journal of British Studies 61, no. 3 (2022), pp. 676–701

• Featured in The Sunday Telegraph, 13 November 2022

‘The secret of efficiency? Social relations and patronage in the British Army in the era of the First World War’, English Historical Review 135, no. 577 (2020), pp.1527–1557

‘Goats mingling with sheep? Professionalisation, personalities, and partnerships between British civil and military engineers, c.1837–1939’, War & Society 38, no. 4 (2019), pp. 268–285

Book chapters

‘Evacuating Gallipoli: Military advice and the politics of decision-making, 1915-16’, in T. G. Heck and W. D. Mills (eds), Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences (Army University Press, 2023), pp. 377–400

‘From Gallipoli to the Western Front: The difficulties of learning and adapting across theatres’, in P. Dennis (ed.), The Skill of Adaptability: The Learning Curve in Combat (Big Sky, 2018), pp. 55–74

Forthcoming

(Edited with M. P. M. Finch and D. G. Morgan-Owen) Framing the First World War: Knowledge, Learning, and Military Thought (forthcoming: University Press of Kansas, 2025)

 

Dr Aimee Fox PURE Profile

Research centres or groups:  

• Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War
• King’s Contemporary British History