Dr James Corum teaches military history at Salford University UK, having been dean of the Baltic Defence College 2009-2014. From 1991 to 2004, he was a professor at the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. In 2005 he was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where he held a Leverhulme Fellowship, and then an associate professor at the US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Dr Corum is the author of several books on military history, including The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform (1992); The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918-1940 (1997); The Luftwaffe's Way of War: German Air Doctrine, 1911-1945, with Richard Muller (1998); Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists, with Wray Johnson (2003); and Fighting the War on Terror: A Counterinsurgency Strategy (2007). His eighth book on Cold War history is Rearming Germany (2011). He is the editor in chief of the translation (from German) of the Encyclopedia of the First World War (2 volumes) (2012). He has also authored more than 60 major book chapters and journal articles on a variety of subjects related to air power and military history, and was one of the primary authors of Field Manual 3-24, the US Army and US Marine Corps doctrine on counterinsurgency. Dr Corum served in Iraq in 2004 as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve.

He holds a master's degree from Brown University, a Master of Letters from Oxford University, and a PhD from Queen's University, Canada.