Rate My Professor Rhys Crawley

Dr Rhys Crawley is a Senior Lecturer in History at UNSW Canberra in the School of Humanities & Social Sciences, University of New South Wales. He holds a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours from the University of Wollongong and a PhD from the University of New South Wales. His research specializations lie in military and intelligence history, encompassing Australian military history, the war in Afghanistan, special operations, First World War operational history, military logistics, espionage, and domestic security intelligence. Crawley supervises postgraduate students in military history, war studies, defence studies, contemporary operations, and intelligence studies.

Crawley's distinguished career trajectory includes serving as a historian at the Australian War Memorial from 2016 to 2023, during which he was a Partner Investigator on the ARC Linkage Project memorySCAPE: the commemoration of war using a database narrative framework (LP180100080). From 2010 to 2016, he worked at the Australian National University's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs as principal researcher and co-author of the multi-volume Official History of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, as well as co-author of volume 1 of the Official History of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian, and Post-Cold War Operations. In 2024-2025, he held positions as senior research fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Military History and visiting scholar at the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He is the author of the Official History of Australian Operations in Afghanistan, 2005-2010, and notable books such as Climax at Gallipoli: The Failure of the August Offensive (2014), The Secret Cold War: The Official History of ASIO, 1975-1989 (2016, co-authored with John Blaxland)—which received the 2018 Association of Former Intelligence Officers Best Foreign Intelligence Book of the Year Award—Intelligence and the Function of Government (2018), Gallipoli: New Perspectives on the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force 1915-16 (2018), and The Long Search for Peace: Observer Missions and Beyond, 1947-2006 (2019). Crawley has produced three books, 39 book chapters, three edited books, five journal articles, four reports, and 26 conference presentations, significantly advancing scholarly understanding of Australian defence and intelligence operations.