About Me

The Short of It

Hi, my name is Carson Teuscher. I’m a graduate of Ohio State University with a Ph.D. in Military History.

Professionally, I spend much of my time studying the military past. I look at ways in which allies and military partners develop systems that make fighting together, easier.

When I’m not in the archives, writing, or working on various projects, I like to get out into nature and explore the Pacific Northwest with my wife and our two wonderful children. I’m an amateur hobbyist in many respects—a beginner ham radio operator (KK7KAQ), fly fisherman, farmhand, stamp collector, quote collector, fountain pen enthusiast, scale modeler, website builder, rockhound, language learner, and nature photographer—but I’m intensely curious about each and, perhaps more than anything, simply love learning new things.

Feel free to take a peek at my CV, my ongoing list of projects, or my notes page, a sort of digital notebook where I like to record random memories, ideas, and things I learn while working. As always, shoot me a message if you’d like to get in touch.

The Long of It

Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, I grew up wanting to follow my dad into dentistry. Life, however, had other plans. As an undergraduate exercise science major, I struggled through my introductory biology and chemistry classes—an ominous portent. Over Christmas vacation my freshman year, I sat in on my cousin’s wisdom tooth surgery. That singular experience was more than enough to convince me the dental profession was not for me!

Unlike most of my friends, I found my history classes far more enjoyable. It made sense; according to my mom one of the first things I ever told my first grade teacher was that “I only read non-fiction books.”¹ As I grew up it seemed to stick. I remember spending a lot of my downtime thumbing through books on the ancient world, life in medieval Europe, the World Wars, and American history. During my second year in college I decided to switch majors and never looked back.

It has been a rewarding decision. Studying history has enabled me to visit archives across the United States, Canada, and Europe, helped me appreciate the perspectives, emotions, and motivations of people from the past, and furnished me with the analytical tools to navigate the complexities of the modern world.

As an undergraduate I struggled to hone in on my fields of interest. I was lucky enough to spend two months studying abroad at Cambridge University—my first ever trip to England. I had a perceptive mentor who recognized in me a budding interest in military history. He encouraged me to “get into the archives” to see the past for myself. So it was that on our last weekend across the pond I found myself neck-deep in 75-year-old papers stamped “Most Secret” in bold red ink at the British National Archives. Recorded on those crinkly onionskin pages were the war diaries of the British Expeditionary Force, priceless artifacts compiled during the chaotic retreat to Dunkirk in June 1940. I was hooked.

After graduating from Brigham Young University in 2016, I returned to England to study, of all things, U.S. History at the University of Oxford. That proved an equally rewarding experience. That November while desperately searching for an essay topic I met a Danish woman named Birgit whose late husband had been a British Army veteran in North Africa and Italy. She graciously allowed me to read his unpublished memoir recounting his wartime experiences.

Birgit had another memoir in her possession, too—one written by a Danish compatriot named Aage Juul who had also fought as part of the British Army in Italy. His, however, was a story I never thought I’d hear. You see, Juul’s wartime experiences unfolded as an unpredictably transnational odyssey, one that saw him escape Nazi occupation in his native Denmark, abscond to Great Britain via Sweden, lead a combat infantry platoon off the Anzio beachhead, fall into German captivity, and subsequently escape back to friendly lines and survive the remainder of the gruesome campaign through Italy.

Juul’s story certainly picqued my interest, offering as it did a unique perspective on the cosmopolitan nature of the Allied effort in Italy. The prospect of broadening my knowledge of Juul’s experience and the war in the Mediterranean convinced me to continue my study of military history in the doctoral program at Ohio State University. My wife and I moved to Columbus after our first year of marriage in Utah in 2018 and really enjoyed our new life in the midwest.

I enjoyed working with my OSU advisor, Dr. Peter Mansoor. He threw me headlong into the complicated world of multinational military operations—a subject that encompasses everything from the vagaries of national policy and grand strategy down to the minutiae of tactics, language, and culture on the battlefield. I also loved taking writing and reading seminars from renowned historians like Geoffrey Parker and Bruno Cabanes, both of whom eventually served on my dissertation committee.

As life ground to a halt with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, I started to realize that what really fascinated me was question of how the Allies got to the point where they could field flexible, multinational armies in Italy by 1944. International travel eventually returned, and so too did our ability to conduct archival research. Visits to archives on the east coast of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom further focused my research efforts on the formation of the Allied coalition in the Mediterranean and the mechanisms they developed that enabled them to conduct sweeping multinational and expeditionary operations on the theater level in North Africa and Sicily. You can read more about my dissertation here.

Other big changes accompanied the pandemic, including the birth of our first child and a big cross-country move back to the Pacific Northwest, where we were lucky to finish my graduate program remotely.

I completed my Ph.D. in 2024. Along the way I was lucky to participate in fellowships in subjects as diverse as advanced Portuguese and grand strategy, participate in staff rides to battlefields ranging from Sicily to the eastern battlefields of the American Civil War, present at history conferences on both sides of the Atlantic, serve for four years as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Discussion Section Leader, and attend a monthlong military history and professional development seminar in Lexington, Virgina hosted by the Society for Military History.

My work has been published in a variety of outlets, both online and in print. I’ve had articles appear in Military Review, On Point: The Journal of Army History, Occupied Italy, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, among others. Between 2017–18, Dr. Reid Neilson and I edited the travel diary of Elder David O. McKay, a Latter-day Saint Apostle who conducted a groundbreaking transpacific missionary tour between 1920–21. The book, Pacific Apostle, was published by University of Illinois Press in 2020. I’m currently editing Aage Juul’s soldier memoir, too, a book entitled Campaigning with the Buffs: A Dane’s Odyssey from Anzio to the Alps.

Today we live on a working farm in Washington state where our first child has been joined by a second. We have a cat that acts like a dog, an endless list of projects to keep us busy, and loving family members on both sides just a short drive away. When I’m not wrangling animals, building fences, picking fruit, or working from my office in a hundred-year-old barn, you can find me exploring the PNW, fishing (with questionable success), or playing with my kids.

In mid-2024 I migrated my professional website to this more personal space, where I like to post articles, notes, archival findings, photos, and other tidbits from my life. I’m not on social media, but I do record some of my daily doings here. You can find my CV here, as well as a seperate list of ongoing projects. I keep a running list of hobbies and interests, and enjoy collecting inspiring and interesting quotes from time to time, too. Feel free to have a look.