Robert McLain, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Department of History

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Teaching interests: Modern Britain and India, Gender, Social Theory, Modern Europe, World War II

Research interests: Modern Britain and India

Brief biography: ROBERT MCLAIN was born in Chillan, Chile.  He was raised in mainly Mississippi, but spent some time in the oilfields for Texas with his father.  He earned his undergraduate degree at Mississippi State University with an emphasis in Marketing and International Economics.  His natural restlessness led him away from the business world and into a variety of jobs, including waiter, bartender, and deckhand on a Mississippi River towboat, where he luckily managed to keep life and limb intact.  It was also during this time that he earned his M.A. in history from the University of Southern Mississippi (1996) and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2003).

He specializes in the “New Imperial” history of the British Empire, emphasizing the roles of race, gender, and sexuality in ideologically undergirding and protecting colonial power, particularly in India.  He is the author of "The Indian Corps on the Western Front: A Reconsideration," published in War in the Age of Technology: Myriad Faces of Modern Armed Conflict, New York University Press, 2001.  He has also recently published “Strategies of Inclusion: Lajpat Rai and the Critique of the British Raj” for The Historic Tradition in Modern Europe series by Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, as well as a book length historical context study, "Peopling the Picketwire: A History of the Pinon Canyon Manuever Site" for the Army Corps of Engineers.  He is currently working on a journal length piece, "Body Politics: Colonial Masculinity and the Struggle for Political Reform in India,1917-1919."