Eric Michael Burke
Ph.D. Student in U.S. Military History at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016 – Present
Advisor: Joseph T. Glatthaar
U.S. Army, Light Infantry Team Leader, 2006-2010
BA, History, Ohio University, Honors Tutorial College, 2010-2014
MA, History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014-2016
My research focuses principally on the interrelationships between systems of leadership, organizational culture and learning, operational behavior, and tactical adaptation in both large and small complex adaptive military organizations throughout history. More specifically, my dissertation project examines the evolution of leadership systems and tactical adaptation between shifting operational, human, and cultural environments within the Fifteenth Army Corps of the Union Army across multiple campaigns during the American Civil War. I am interested in the ways in which elements of organizational structure like the volunteer regimental system and division into corps d’armee shaped systems of distributed leadership and the pattern of cultural evolution driving tactical adaptation within Federal ranks, as well as how operational behaviors in the field were impacted by shifts in national war aims across the conflict. My project also makes an effort to explain the reciprocal relationship through which particular leaders and particular commands shape the “character” of one another over long service together.
In the past, my research has also engaged with nineteenth-century American history topics beyond the purview of military history. My master’s thesis, “Egyptian Darkness: Antebellum Reconstruction and Southern Illinois in the Republican Imagination, 1854-1861,” focused on early Republican (1854-1860) plans to “reconstruct” and “Northernize” the poor white inhabitants of southern Illinois (“Egypt”) before the Civil War – an intellectual prelude to many of the same efforts later directed toward poor whites of the postbellum South. Prior to this project, my undergraduate honor’s thesis, “Decidedly Unmilitary: The Roots of Social Order in the Union Army” examined how the simultaneous coexistence of conflicting individual motivations for service exhibited by members of a volunteer regiment, as well as the natural ebb and flow of those motivations over time, necessitated an adaptive leadership style by junior leaders in order to secure the obedience of subordinates.