Academic Research and Lecturing

Teaching and Lecturing

Sarah is a lecturer in the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London, and is based full-time at the Defence Academy of the UK where she teaches serving military officers and civil servants from more than fifty different countries. She also teaches online modules for civilians at KCL. As a result, she has teaching experience in both Professional Military Education and in mainstream academia, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Sarah teaches on the Advanced Command and Staff Course at the Defence Academy, which is a closed one-year postgraduate programme only available to military and civil service students, in which the course members are awarded an MA. She also teaches on Intermediate Officer Development courses for the Royal Air Force, and Intermediate Command and Staff Courses for the British Army and the Royal Navy. She has supervised essays for students at the Royal College of Defence Studies, and postgraduate dissertations for both civilian and military course members at the Joint Services Command and Staff College and on the KCL International Affairs Programme. Sarah is the leader and course designer for the Pacific Case Study on the Operational Studies module for ACSC.

Sarah also teaches on the International Affairs MA Program in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London. She teaches courses on Conflict in International History, Intelligence in Conflict, Introductions to Critical Research Methodologies and Critical Engagement with Literature. She is also the tutor for the ‘Espionage, Intelligence and National Security’ and ‘A Delicate Balance: Intelligence, Espionage and National Security in WWII’ classes at the University of Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education.

Sarah has training in questioning techniques, principles of marking and feedback, developing students’ critical thinking skills, leading seminars and in emerging kinds of assessments. She believes strongly in innovative teaching methods and practice.

Research and Expertise

Sarah is an experienced historical researcher, and has carried out research in various countries and in many different archives and libraries. Specialising in the history of the Second World War, she spent the duration of her PhD working at the world-renowned Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Situated in the School of Security Studies at King’s, the DWS is one of the only academic departments in the world to focus on understanding the realm of conflict, security and international politics, and forms the largest community of scholars in the world dedicated to producing world-leading research in war studies. Sarah has been fortunate to study within this community, utilising intersectional methodology and receiving inter-disciplinary input from an international community of scholars of the Second World War. Sarah has spent time researching in British archives such as the National Archives at Kew, the Imperial War Museum, the National Maritime Museum, the National Museum of the Royal Navy, the RAF Medmenham Archive, the Bletchley Park archives and the British Library. In the United States, she has carried out research at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington D.C., Naval History and Heritage Command, the National Cryptologic Museum and the Library of Congress, as well as various other archives and libraries throughout the country. These included working out of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, where she used the Hawai’i State Archives, the Honolulu Public Library and Newspaper Archives, Pearl Harbor and the UH’s impressive War Depository to carry out research on the women of Hawai’i during the Second World War.

Sarah specialises in recovering the often-forgotten history of women during times of war. This can be a very difficult task for a variety of methodological reasons, and as such Sarah has developed a novel approach, using intersectional methodology (a mixture of military, intelligence, cultural and social history and anthropology approaches), which often involves looking for less obviously available primary sources. These can range from diaries and oral history interviews to photographs, newspaper articles and personal reminiscence and testimony from veterans. Sarah believes very strongly in the recovery of women’s war history, and has focused on the contributions of those who tend to be especially missing from the historical record - women in the Allied military services working in intelligence and communications. She has studied extensively the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (Royal Air Force), the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Royal Navy), the Auxiliary Territorial Service (British Army), the Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (US Navy), the Women’s Army Corps (US Army) and the Women’s Air Raid Defense Service in Hawai’i.

Areas of Expertise

  • Conflict and War in general

  • WWII Allied Military Services

  • WWII Allied Military Operations

  • British Intelligence in WWII

  • US Intelligence in WWII

  • Anglo-American Intelligence

  • SIGINT (signals intelligence) and COMINT (communications intelligence)

  • The Battle of the Atlantic

  • The Battle of Britain

  • Women in the British WWII military auxiliaries (WAAF, ATS, WRNS and ATA)

  • Women and the British Home Front in WWII

  • RAF Fighter Command

  • RAF Bomber Command

  • The Royal Navy

  • The Royal Air Force

  • The US Navy

  • Operation Overlord (D-Day)

  • The Dowding System and Radar (and counter-measures) in WWII

  • Anti-Aircraft Artillery and Defences

  • WWII Bombing Campaigns

  • Aerial Reconnaissance and Photographic Interpretation in WWII

  • Operation Chastise (The Dambusters)

  • The War in the Pacific

  • Pacific Island History

  • The History of Hawai’i

    Sarah is available to consult on any of these topics, and various others, as well as on the Second World War in general.