Hew Strachan University of St Andrews, UK
Hew Strachan has been Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College since 2002, and was Director of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War between 2003 and 2012. He also serves on the Strategic Advisory Panel of the Chief of the Defence Staff and on the UK Defence Academy Advisory Board, as well as being a Trustee of the Imperial War Museum, a Commonwealth War Graves Commissioner, and member of both the National Committee for the Centenary of the First World War and the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Born in Edinburgh in 1949, and educated at Rugby and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, he was elected a Research Fellow of Corpus Christi in 1975, became a Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the RMA Sandhurst in 1978, 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 ten-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 book is Carl von Clausewitz's On War: A Biography (2007, and translated into Portuguese, German, Dutch, Polish, Italian and Finnish).
He has co-edited the SAGE journal War in History since its founding issue in 1994 and is 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), (with Andreas Herberg-Rothe) Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (2007), (with Sibylle Scheipers), The Changing Character of War (2011), and (with Holger Afflerbach), How Fighting Ends: A History of Surrender (2012).
He 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. In 2010 he chaired a task force on the implementation of the Armed Forces Covenant for the Prime Minister. In 2011 he was the inaugural Humanitas Visiting Professor in War Studies at the University of Cambridge and became a specialist adviser to the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. He is a Deputy Lieutenant for Tweeddale, and a Brigadier in the Queen's Bodyguard for Scotland (Royal Company of Archers). In December 2012, Foreign Policy magazine included him in its list of top global thinkers for the year. He was knighted in the 2013 New Year’s Honours.
