Matt Oyos received a B.A. from Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and went on to earn a masters degree in history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  He completed doctoral work in history at Ohio State University in 1993, and from 1993-1996 held a post-doctoral fellowship with the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, which was then headquartered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Matt has taught at Radford University since 1996, where he has offered courses on American history, modern Latin America, the history of warfare, the Vietnam War, and World War II.  His main area of research and writing has been on turn of the twentieth century military affairs.  He has published several journal articles in this area, and in 1998 provided the introduction and editing for the centennial republication of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders.  Matt's present project, Rough Rider in Chief is a book-length study of Theodore Roosevelt's efforts to create a modern military force for a new century of warfare.

Matt Oyos was trained as a military historian, but, as another military historian--much more eminent than himself --once said, what military historians really study, at root, is not militaries but war.  War is a scourge, but it has also been long been a fundamental influence on human affairs.  A complete understanding of the past and the present is not possible without examining war as a motive force in human history.  In his courses and research,  Matt emphasizes, therefore, how wars shape societies and how societies shape war.