Bill Allison is a scholar of American military history, specifically the Vietnam War. He is a Professor of History at Georgia Southern University, joining the faculty there as Chair of the Department of History in 2008. After earning a BA and MA in History at East Texas State University in 1989 and 1991, he completed his PhD in history at Bowling Green State University in 1995. He then taught at the University of Saint Francis (Indiana) before joining the History Department at Weber State University from 1999-2008. During the 2002-2003 academic year, he was Visiting Professor in the Department of Strategy and International Security at the USAF Air War College and later served as Distinguished Professor of Military History at the USAF School for Advanced Air and Space Studies from 2010-2011. He also served two years as the General Harold K. Johnson Visiting Chair in Military History at the US Army War College (2012-2014). 

He is author of The Gulf War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), Military Justice in Vietnam: The Rule of Law in an American War (University Press of Kansas, 2007), and American Diplomats in Russia: Case Studies in Orphan Diplomacy, 1917-1919 (Praeger, 1997), and is co-author with Janet Valentine and the late Jeffery Grey of American Military History: A Survey from Colonial Times to the Present (Routledge, 2020), among other works. He has presented and lectured at numerous conferences and universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Zurich, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Amsterdam, the Australian Defence Force Academy, the US Army Heritage and Education Center, and the USAF Air Command & Staff College. In addition to recent essays on war remembrance and commemoration, his current research includes book projects on the Tet Offensive and America in 1968.

He is a former Trustee and Vice-President of the Society for Military History and was awarded the Society for Military History's Edwin Simmons Distinguished Service Award. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Military History and is editor for Routledge’s Critical Moments in American History series. He serves on the Department of the Army Historical Advisory Subcommittee and was awarded the Army’s Outstanding Civilian Service Medal in 2014. Since 2019, he is the series editor for Modern War Studies at the University Press of Kansas, and since 2023 is the Program Director for the Society for Military History Summer Seminar in Military History. He co-hosts with Prof. Brian Feltman (Georgia Southern University) the podcast Military Historians are People, Too!, and is a battlefield tour guide with The Cultural Experience (Vietnam), a UK-based battlefield tour company. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Born and raised in Sulphur Springs, Texas, he lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina with spouse Jennifer and black lab Tucker.