Mary Elizabeth Walters

Mary Elizabeth Walters is an Assistant Professor at Air Command and Staff College. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019 and her MA from UNC in 2014. She spent a year of fieldwork in Albania and Kosovo funded by a National Security Education Program Boren Fellowship.

Her dissertation examines the 1999 Kosovo Refugee Crisis in Albania, specifically looking at why and how NATO took on the tasks of a refugee assistance organization during the crisis, as well as how NATO’s military humanitarianism impacted civilian humanitarian organizations, local Albanian populations, and the Kosovar refugees themselves. Walters’ dissertation research builds from her MA thesis, titled “New Military Humanitarians: Competition and Cooperation between NATO and Humanitarian Agencies in 1999 Kosovar Refugee Assistance in Albania.” Her research places the 1999 Kosovo Refugee Crisis within a broader narrative of changing military roles in the 1990s and the rise of military humanitarianism that continues today.

Walters has also received numerous FLAS grants from the Department of Education to study Albanian and Serbo-Croatian, as well as the Allan Millet Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Society for Military History and research funding from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation. Previously she served as the Graduate Student Representative for the Society for Military History between 2013–2016.