Kathy Williams has been the Director of General Education and Professor of History at Cogswell Polytechnical College since 2005. Prior to coming to Cogswell she was Deputy Executive Officer and doctoral faculty member, the City University of New York Ph.D. Program in History, and Deputy Chair of the Department of History at Bronx Community College, CUNY. She has also taught history at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan, and at Florida State University, Republic of Panama.

Dr. Williams, a naval historian, is presently serving a second term as trustee of the Society for Military History. She is on the nominating committee for the North American Society for Oceanic History and is an advisory board member for H-Maritime. She has also served on the editorial advisory board of The Journal of Military History. For ten years before moving to California she was the executive director of the New York Military Affairs Symposium (NYMAS), which hosts a weekly military history lecture series in New York City.

In addition to book chapters, articles and reviews, her published work includes Secret Weapon: U.S. High-frequency Direction Finding in the Battle of the Atlantic (Naval Institute Press, 1996); Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II, (Naval Institute Press, 2001), winner of the History of Science Society's Women in Science award in 2005 and the North American Society for Oceanic History's John Lyman award for U.S. Naval History in 2001; and Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea (Naval Institute Press, 2004), winner of NASOH's John Lyman award for biography/autobiography in U.S. Naval History (2004). She has just completed a memoir about her father: The Measure of a Man: My Father, the Marine Corps, and Saipan, forthcoming from the Naval Institute Press in 2013, and is presently at work on a new naval technology project.

Dr. Williams was born in Virginia and grew up in Italy and England. In addition to Japan and the Republic of Panama she also lived in Germany and Puerto Rico. She is a graduate of the City University of New York (Ph.D.), Columbia University (MA), and Wellesley College (BA) Phi Beta Kappa.

E-Mail:  kwilliams@cogswell.edu
Phone:  408-498-5114