William J. Hamblin
William James "Bill" Hamblin is a member of the history department faculty at Brigham Young University and an expert in ancient and medieval warfare, the Crusades and Scandinavian history. He is a former board member of the Mormon apologetic group FARMS.
Biography
Hamblin served as an LDS missionary in Italy from 1973-1975.[1] Hamblin received his bachelors degree at BYU and his masters degree from the University of Michigan. He also holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan which he completed in 1985. The title of his Dissertation was The Fatimid Army During the Early Crusades. Prior to joining the faculty of BYU in 1989 Hamblin was a history professor at the University of Southern Mississippi[2], an instructor at Campbell University and a middle east intelligence analyst for the United States Department of Defense. Hamblin contributed many articles to The International Military Encyclopedia.[3]
During the summer of 2008 Hamblin was a student sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities at a five week course sponsored through the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga entitled "Holy Land and Holy City in Classical Judaism, Christianity and Islam.[4]
Among books by Hamblin is Warfare in the Ancient Near East published by Routledge in 2005.[5]
Hamblin lives in Orem with his wife, the former Loree Peay. They have three children.
Apologetics
In the early 1990s Hamblin was involved with J. Michael Allen in creating mormon-l, which was meant to be a forum for people to correspond with Mormon academics. It however soon degenerated into a general chat forum.[6]
Hamblin has also written extensively on archaeology and the Book of Mormon, both in general articles for the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies[7] and in specific responses to attacks on the historicity of the Book of Mormon.[8]
