A native of San Jose, California, Mark Charles Fissel graduated from unabashedly leftist institutions, the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of California at Berkeley. During his sophomore year he resided in Perugia, Italy, and traveled to Spain on a Motobenelli. Receiving his baccalaureate degree with honors in 1973, he again fled the United States and spent six months traveling, getting as far afield as Yugoslavia. In the autumn of 1974 he began the doctoral program at Berkeley, under the tutelage of Thomas Garden Barnes, the only faculty member willing to teach military history. After researching in English national archives and regional record offices, Fissel completed his doctoral dissertation in 1983. In the intervening years, the papers of the Dukes of Hamilton were deposited in the Scottish Record Office, and these cast considerable light on the Bishops’ Wars, the subject of his first book. These newly available manuscripts prompted additional research in Edinburgh, London and elsewhere in 1986-1987, resulting in a book published by Cambridge University Press in 1994. The period 1991-2002 saw him as the Director of a Center for Teaching and Learning, a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Istanbul, as the Dean of Harris Manchester College at the University of Oxford, and ultimately serving as an associate vice president for academic affairs at a small university located at the Augusta Arsenal, in Georgia, USA. During the above-mentioned migrations he also published War and government in Britain, 1598-1650 (1991) and English Warfare, 1511-1642 (2001). Two co-edited collections have appeared as well (Amphibious Warfare 1000-1700: Commerce, State Formation and European Expansion [2005], and Law and Authority in Early Modern England [2007]). Current projects include a co-authored survey of amphibious warfare, under contract to Naval Institute Press (forthcoming 2014), a book on the Duke of Hamilton’s adventures during the reign of Charles I (currently under review by a British press), and a book-length study of the battle of Newburn (1640) for a North American Press.