Michael J. Carley is an expert on 20^th-century international relations and the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. His Research interests focus on relations between the Soviet Union and Western Europe and the United States between 1917 and 1945. He has written two books and some thirty papers and essays on French involvement in the Russian Civil War (1917-1921), Soviet relations with the Great Powers between the two world wars, issues of appeasement and the origins and conduct of the Second World War. He has been published in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy and Russia.

Professor Carley is working on two large projects. The first concerns the troubled relations between Soviet Russia/the USSR and the West from 1917 to 1930. His book, Silent Conflict: A Hidden History of Early Soviet-Western Relations, was published in late January 2014 by Rowman & Littlefield, in the US, and is available from Amazon and Indigo. It was recently recognized by the American magazine Choice as the Outstanding Academic Title, 2014 in Central and Eastern European history.

His second project deals with the origins and creation of the "Grand Alliance" against Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Work on this second title is progressing well, and the provisional title is A Near-Run Thing: The Grand Alliance of World War II.