Posted: March 12, 2026
Roger Thompson's (BA'89/91, MA'94) MA thesis Brown Shoes, Black Shoes, And Felt Slippers: Parochialism and the Evolution of the Post-War US Navy was published in 1995 and has become one of the standard texts in US military bureaucratic politics in the 20th Century. It is regularly cited in books, articles, MA theses and doctoral dissertations even now, more than 30 years since he completed grad school at Dalhousie.
One of the greatest distinctions his book earned was when it was called “a classic” by the renowned military sociologist Professor Charles Moskos, a prolific researcher whose work was translated into 19 languages. In a recent doctoral dissertation, Thompson’s thesis was compared favourably to the work of the famous Harvard academic Professor Stephen P. Rosen, who wrote the award-winning book Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military. Unlike Rosen’s book, only a small number of copies of Thompson’s book were printed, but since it was published by the US Naval War College, a PDF version was later published and is now free to read on the Internet, thus securing its place in the field for future researchers and historians.
Thompson is currently a Research Fellow at Dalhousie’s Centre for the Study of Security and Development and works as an online academic tutor. He has been teaching online English courses on Preply since September 2025, and has taught students from Korea, Ukraine, Brazil, and Canada so far. He has received only five-star reviews, and on December 20, he had joined the top 100 tutors on Preply —reaching 55th top ranked—after less than four months of teaching. He attributes his success so far to the education he received at Dalhousie, and the online teaching courses he took at Cornell, Penn, Johns Hopkins, and the World TESOL Academy earlier this year. Roger also says that we should all embrace life-long learning and be ready to broaden our horizons by learning a second language, as he did when he took French as a freshman at King's/Dalhousie.
