Dr Samuel White

Dr Samuel White FRHistS is the Scientia Senior Lecturer in Military Law and War Studies at UNSW Canberra. He joined UNSW Canberra in 2026 after a period as a Visiting Fellow whilst working at the National University of Singapore (NUS). There, Dr White was the inaugural Senior Research Fellow in Peace and Security at NUS’ Centre for International Law. Dr White was retained as a Global Fellow at NUS where he continues to teach into the Singapore Academy of International Law. 

In 2024, Dr White was appointed as the first Army Fellow at the Australian War Memorial, a role he continues to hold. In this, Dr White leads a line of research into military history within Australia, and is curating the exhibition on Australian Indigenous military service within the Northern Territory titled Miriŋu Dhäwu (Soldier Stories). Concurrently, Dr White is the Research Director for the Australian Red Cross’ Lores of War project, mapping customary international humanitarian law across First Nations Australia (with an initial focus in Arnhem Land). This mirrors work he co-directs with Trisakti University and International Committee of the Red Cross, canvassing customary humanitarian values across Indonesia (as part of a wider series he edits, called The Laws of Yesterday’s Wars). The series aims to critically question how international the laws of war are, a question that arose from his work as a Senior Legal Officer in the Office of International Law, Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department. He was made Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2025 for his scholarship on cross-cultural understandings of violence.

Dr White entered academia as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Adelaide Law School, where he completed his PhD on some constitutional aspects of the Royal Prerogative in Australia – specifically, whether constitutional executive power extended to deployments of Federal troops into States, without State consent. For this topic, he was appointed a 2025 Fellow of the National Library of Australia, and later as a 2026 Resident Fellow at Columbia Law School’s National Security Law program, funded by an American Australian Association Veteran Scholarship. Whilst completing his PhD in two years, he concurrently published his first monograph, Keeping the Peace of the Realm (LexisNexis, 2021).

Alongside his academic pursuits, Samuel has actively served as both a Royal Australian Infantry Corps and an Australian Army Legal Corps officer in a variety of tactical, operational and strategic level postings. These include platoon command in the 9th Royal Queensland Regiment; Staff Officer in the Directorate of Operations and International Law; Deputy Command Legal Officer - Headquarters Maritime Border Command; and as a Legal Officer within Special Operations Command. He transferred to the Army Reserves in early 2023, and in 2024 took up a posting as SO2 First Nations Strategy, within Army Headquarters. In this role, he is OIC Project Greenskin - a strategic story initiative of Army military history.