Rate My Professor Gavin Rand

Gavin Rand is Associate Professor of History and Portfolio Leader for History, Politics and International Relations at the University of Greenwich, a position he has held since joining the institution in 2005. Previously, he taught for one year in the Department of History at Lancaster University. Rand studied Politics and Modern History at the University of Manchester, where he later completed an MA in Cultural History and a PhD funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), under the supervision of Professors Patrick Joyce and Anindita Ghosh. A cultural historian by training, he is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) and serves as Centre Lead for the History Research Group at Greenwich.

Rand's research specializations centre on the history of the military in colonial South Asia, with particular attention to the people, institutions, and ideas that shaped the organisation and deployment of military power in and beyond British India. His academic interests encompass the role of indigenous labour in the imperial military, how knowledge, culture, and technology informed colonial violence, changing ideas of race in colonial recruitment practices, the history of colonial frontiers, and wider histories and historiographies of violence in colonial and postcolonial worlds, including genocide. He led a British Academy-funded project from 2012 to 2014 entitled ‘ReNewing the Military History of Colonial South Asia’, which produced the co-edited volume Culture, Conflict and the Military in Colonial South Asia (Routledge, 2020). Additionally, he collaborated on a Heritage Lottery-funded project with Nutkhut titled ‘Never set eyes on the land’, resulting in an educational toolkit and public exhibition. Rand is co-editor of an ongoing book series with Routledge. His key publications include ‘Military labour markets in colonial India from the Company state to WWII’ in the Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia (2021), ‘The surf that marks the edge and advance of civilization: frontier wars in Colonial South Asia’ in A Comparative History of Guerrilla Warfare (University of Kansas Press, 2024), and ‘Decolonising the immortal heritage: Empire, war and history in contemporary Britain’ (2022). He serves as a committee member of the Society for the History of War and was formerly a Councillor for the Army Records Society. Rand has acted as external examiner for undergraduate history degrees at Derby, Kent, and Oxford Brookes universities, and for postgraduate degrees at Cambridge, King’s College London, Kingston, and Leicester universities.