CCT Professor Highlight: Luke Revell

CCT is excited to feature Adjunct Professor Luke Revell in our latest professor highlight!

Luke Revell served in the United States Marine Corps for over 23 years, retiring as the Marine Corps Intelligence Chief last August. As such, Revell led the Marine Corps’ more than 12,000 uniformed and civilian professionals at the policy level. This concluded a career of teaching, leading, and enacting political and military intelligence operations– supporting tactical to strategic level United States policy in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

Revell describes himself as a lifelong learner and a”product of technology-first learning.” With a hiatus between his undergraduate and graduate degrees, Revell has been in some form of schooling since 2007. He started his higher education journey at the American Military University (AMU), pursuing a BA in Competitive Intelligence while stationed in Europe. He concluded that degree while deployed on ship with an infantry battalion. After 18-hour days of amphibious operations, he would attend online classes. His motto was, “if it’s important to you, you get it done.”

Revell then pursued an MBA with a Concentration in Marketing through AMU while in El Salvador, and, in 2019, he began attending AMU’s Strategic Intelligence doctoral program. He aims to finish his dissertation this year. While his dissertation research focuses on automatic context, establishing operational intelligence model frameworks, and defining data-to-analysis translation path, his research focuses at the intersection of technology and sociology, key to the focus area at CCT.

Before coming to Georgetown, Revell and fellow CCT Adjunct, Tyrel Campbell founded a graduate-level book club that focused on the implications of technology, policy, and strategy at a theoretical level. This club built the foundations of the courses he’s taught here at CCT. In the Fall of 2022 and 2023, Revell taught “The Mediated State,” adding “Organized State/Organized Society” to his course load in 2023. The Mediated State focused on the use of information power levers between individuals, nations, states, and multinationals in our increasingly connected world. Organized State/Organized Society had students chart the impacts of physical and civil geography on regional conflict.

Revell taught a CCT course called “Identifying Strategic Perspectives” in the Spring of 2023 that plotted the objective, position, and intent of decision makers using a three-dimensional personality profile. Through a review of historical leaders, students discussed both how, why, and what methods were used to implement decisions. Revell hopes to write more CCT courses in the future, and has a variety of possible topics in the works ranging from internet extremism to the future evolution of humanity.

Revell described his teaching philosophy as “that of a Sherpa”– a guide along a student’s academic journey. He knows where the course will go and how to get there, but his weekly agendas are tailored to student interests, current-events, and in-class discussions. He is a huge fan of C. Wright Mills’ philosophical methodology, understanding both the individual and the society to garner implications, applying this towards the general theories discussed in his courses.

While his classes are reading intensive, he seeks to match the lessons to each students’ pace and level of understanding. The objective is for students to leave his classes with a theoretical understanding of the concepts, so that they can operationalize them down the road. His core teaching tenet? Help open students’ eyes to the world around them– “Don’t just look. See.”

For more information on Professor Revell, check out his LinkedIn