Bio
Dr. Doug Leonard’s academic work focuses on African intellectual history, particularly in the 20th century. His most recent book, Intellectual Decolonization in West Africa: Time and the Escape from Empire (Bloomsbury, 2026) follows a group of post-colonial West African intellectuals as they employed a non-linear understanding of time, allowing them to understand and describe past, present, and future simultaneously through creative approaches to social construction and political form that relied on a careful analysis and application of narrative myths, tales, stories, poems, and parables.
Dr. Leonard has published more broadly on the origin, movement, and exchange of ideas between and among Africans and Europeans regarding social structure and the appropriate form of political rule both during and after the colonial period, including his first book, Anthropology, Colonial Policy and the Decline of French Empire in Africa (Bloomsbury, 2020), and research articles in historical, regional, and anthropological journals. He has also published extensively on university-level teaching. His next book-length project, tentatively entitled, The Sahara: An Imaginative History, traces the position of the world’s largest dry desert as both source and site of human dreams for a better world.
In 2019, he retired from the Air Force as a Lieutenant Colonel after 20 years of service as a career intelligence officer. He held various operational and staff positions and commanded at both the detachment and squadron levels.
Education
Doctor of Philosophy, History, Duke University (2012)
Master of Arts, History, Florida State University (2000)
Bachelor of Science, History, United States Air Force Academy (1999)
Professional Experience
Professor of History, U.S. Air Force Academy, (2025-Present)
Associate Professor of History, U.S. Air Force Academy, (2021-2025)
Assistant Professor of History, U.S. Air Force Academy, (2006-2009 and 2017-2021)
Honors & Awards
Winner, Heiser Award for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring (2025 – Institutional Finalist 2022, 2023, 2024)
Air Force Office of Scientific Research 3-Year Research Grant (2023-2025)
Dean’s Humanities Research Grant, US Air Force Academy (2020-2021)
United States Institute for National Security Studies Research Grant
Department Nominee, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Research Award, US Air Force Academy (2022, 2023)
Department Nominee, McDermott Award for Outstanding Research in the Humanities, US Air Force Academy (2020, 2022, 2023)
Finalist, Fulbright Global Scholar Award (2022)
Institutional and Department Nominee, Baylor University Cherry Award for Undergraduate Teaching, US Air Force Academy (2022)
Department Nominee, Excellence in Inclusive Teaching Award, US Air Force Academy (2021)
Mastery of Teaching Community Fellow, US Air Force Academy (2020-2022)
Recipient, Outstanding Academy Educator Award (2007-2008)
Fellow, United States Military Academy Summer Seminar in Military History (2007)
Distinguished Graduate, United States Air Force Academy (1999)
Research and Scholarly Interests
African History, especially North and West Africa
Intellectual History
Imperial and Colonial History
Modern European History
Publications
Academic Monographs
Intellectual Decolonization in West Africa: Time and the Escape from Empire. Bloomsbury, 2026
Anthropology, Colonial Policy and the Decline of French Empire in Africa. Bloomsbury, 2020.
Pee-Reviewed Journal Articles
with Kelsey Monaghan-Bergson, “Legibility as Language: Refractive Autoethnography and the Student Sensory Experience,” Under review at the International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.
“Decolonizing the Major Leagues: Latino Challenges to Baseball Systems of Control in the 1960s,” Journal of Sport History 53, 3 (forthcoming, 2026).
“Engaging World History Through the Self: Building Student Empathy With Reflection,” World History Connected 21, 2 (Summer 2024), online.
“Researching the Self: Autoethnography and Empathy in the University Classroom,” Transformative Dialogues 16, 1 (Fall 2023): 54-71.
“Amadou Hampâté Bâ and the Power of Time in the Social Reconstruction of West Africa,”Journal of West African History 9, 1 (Fall 2023): 1-26.
“Imaginative Links: Islam and Dreams of a Saharan French Empire,” Journal of North African Studies 28, 4 (2023): 952-975.
with DarAsia Elliot, “The Power of Comics in Undergraduate History Research,” World History Bulletin 38, 2 (Fall 2022): 17-21.
with Jackson Ayers, “Experiencing Course-Based Undergraduate History Research in a Technically Intensive Curriculum,” Perspectives in Undergraduate Research and Mentoring, 10.1 (Fall 2021), online.
“Escaping the Bind: Comparing Twenty-First Century US Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the French Response to the Algerian Revolution, 1955–1956,” Anthropology and History 25, 5 (Oct 2014): 627-647.
“‘They do not know how to deal with native unrest’: British intervention and unintended consequences in French North Africa, 1940-1946,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 13, 2 (Fall 2012), online.
Papers Published in Edited Volumes
“Writing Against the Grain: Antenor Firmin and the Refutation of Nineteenth Century European Race Science” in Anywhere but Here: Black Intellectuals in the Atlantic World and Beyond, ed. Kendahl Radcliffe, Jennifer Scott, and Anja Werner (University Press of Mississippi, 2015): 27-46.
Papers Published in Non-Peer-Reviewed Journals
with Timothy D. Haugh, “Improving Outcomes: Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Assessment,” Air and Space Power Journal (Winter 2017): 4-15.