Damien Fenton

Dr Damien Fenton is an Honorary Research Fellow at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand. His interests include Australian and New Zealand military history and he has worked in this area as an academic and a public historian in both countries. He completed his PhD at the University of New South Wales (Australian Defence Force Academy campus).

Prior to returning to New Zealand in 2008, Fenton worked for both the Australian War Memorial and the Australian Department of Veterans' Affairs on projects related to the Second World War, the Korean and Vietnam wars and the First Gulf War. His first book was A False Sense of Security: The Force Structure of the New Zealand Army 1946–1978 (Centre for Strategic Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, 1998). He was also a contributor to American historian Spencer S. Tucker's (ed.) Encyclopedia of World War I: A Political, Social, and Military History (ABC-Clio, 2005). His other major publications are To Cage the Red Dragon: SEATO and the Defence of Southeast Asia 1955–1965 (NUS Press, 2012) and The Anzacs: An Inside View of New Zealanders at Gallipoli (Penguin Group NZ, 2012).

From 2008 to 2013, Fenton was employed by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage where he wrote New Zealand and the First World War, 1914–1919 (Penguin, 2013 – shortlisted in the Illustrated Non-fiction category of the 2014 New Zealand Post Book Awards), one of the first titles to be published as part of the official Centenary History of New Zealand and the First World War publications programme. He is currently writing another book in the series, New Zealand's War against the Ottoman Turks, to be published in 2017.