Academic Year 2008-2009

The British Army, Counter-Insurgency and Strategy in Current Conflict
Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 5:30PM
Cabot Intercultural Center, 7th floor
Speaker: Hew Strachan, Chichele Professor of the History of War, All Souls College, Oxford University

Speaker Biography

Hew Strachan was born and brought up in Edinburgh. He is Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford, Fellow of All Souls College, and Director of the Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.

He was born in Edinburgh in 1949, and educated at Rugby and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Having been a Research Fellow of Corpus Christi from 1975-1978, he became Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the RMA Sandhurst, and then returned to Corpus in 1979, where he was successively Admissions Tutor and Senior Tutor, and is now a Life Fellow. From 1992 to 2001 he was Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow, and from 1996 to 2001 founding Director of the Scottish Centre for War Studies.

His books include: European Armies and the Conduct of War (1983, and also translated into Spanish), Wellington's Legacy: the Reform of the British Army 1830-54 (1984), From Waterloo to Balaclava: Tactics, Technology and the British Army 1815-1854 (1985) (awarded the Templer Medal), The Politics of the British Army (1997) (awarded the Westminster Medal), the first volume of his projected three-volume, The First World War (To Arms) (2001) (awarded two American military history prizes and nominated for the Glenfiddich Scottish book of the year), and The First World War: A New Illustrated History (2003), published to accompany the 10-part Wark Clements television series for Channel 4, (nominated for a British Book Award and translated into German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, French and Greek). His latest publication is Carl von Clausewitz's On War: a biography (2007, and translated into Portuguese, German, Dutch and Italian). He is joint editor of the journal, War in History, and editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (1998), The British Army, Manpower and Society into the 21st Century (2000), Big wars and small wars: the British army and the lessons of war in the 20th century (2006), and (with Andreas Herberg-Rothe) Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (2007).

Strachan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2003 and awarded an Hon. D. Univ. by the University of Paisley in 2005. He is a Deputy Lieutenant for Tweeddale, and a Brigadier and Member of Council of the Queen's Bodyguard for Scotland (Royal Company of Archers).

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