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.

I publish, teach and supervise students at the Master's, PhD and post-doctorate levels in the field (or theme) of the history of international relations. I am interested primarily in France and the Arab world. I am a student and proponent of the "French School" of the history of international relations (HIR), which updated the study of the international phenomenon by including and integrating "deep forces" (economic, social, institutional, cultural, etc.) in the analysis. This approach generated a rich historiography whose originality transformed and reinvigorated the field of international history. This vitality is just as valuable today as it was yesterday in terms of questioning, investigating and discovering, as illustrated by the number of students doing their MA and PhD studies in HIR.

The issue that has intrigued me the most is the connections between the political and economic dimensions internationally. This question underpins many of my publications, in particular my work on Franco-Egyptian relations based on a doctorat d'État (I am among the last to have obtained this venerable diploma under the French university system, as it has now been replaced by the single dissertation). It led to a monograph, currently in printing, on the decolonization of French North Africa. In economic history, my interests focus on movements of capital, international trade and the history of businesses (banks, oil companies, electricity companies).

Since 2004 I have been a founding member and co-ordinator of the Groupement interuniversitaire pour l'histoire des relations internationales (GIHRIC). Along with research, I find teaching a real pleasure, as shown by the Award of Outstanding Achievement in Teaching I received early in my career from the Faculty of Arts and Science. The flame still burns brightly!