Hew Strachan

Sir Hew Francis Anthony Strachan is a British military historian well known for his leadership in scholarly studies of the British Army and the history of the First World War. He is currently a professor of international relations at the University of St Andrews. Before that, Strachan was the Chichele Professor of the History of War at All Souls College, Oxford. 

Strachan was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was educated at Rugby School, then in 1968, was a merchant seaman for three months, working his passage around the world on ships of Ben Line Steamers Ltd. He then spent three years at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, graduating BA in 1971 and proceeding to M.A. in 1975. In 1973, he joined a survey of antiquities in Sudan.

In 1975, Strachan was elected a research fellow of Corpus Christi College, and in 1977–1978 was a senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. In 1978, he returned to Cambridge college as a tutor. He became an admissions tutor and then senior tutor at Corpus Christi College, and in 1992 was elected a life fellow. He was a Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow from 1992 to 2000, then migrated to Oxford as a Chichele Professor of the History of War at All Souls.

He was director of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War from 2004 to 2015. He published a series of important articles on strategy and edited books that have arisen from the project. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Historical Society. He was appointed a deputy lieutenant of Tweeddale in 2006. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Panel of the Royal Air Force Centre for Air Power Studies. 

In addition, he is on the Chief of the Defence Staff's strategic advisory panel, the UK Defence Academy Advisory Board. He is an advisory fellow of the Barsanti Military History Center at the University of North Texas. He was on the council of the National Army Museum and is currently a trustee of the Imperial War Museum. In 2016, he became the Patron of the Western Front Association. He is a visiting professor of the Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy in Trondheim and, in 2009, was the Sir Howard Kippenberger Professor at Victoria University Wellington. He sits on the Centre for War and Diplomacy advisory board at Lancaster University.

On 20 May 2014, Strachan was appointed as Lord Lieutenant of Tweeddale in succession to Captain David Bingham Younger. In 2015, he left Oxford to serve as a professor of international relations at the University of St Andrews. Strachan's early research and published work focussed on the history of the British Army. He was awarded the Templer Medal for From Waterloo to Balaclava and the Westminster Medal for The Politics of the British Army. 

Commissioned by the Oxford University Press to write a history of the First World War to replace C. R. M. F. Cruttwell's one-volume A History of the Great War, 1914-1918, Strachan completed the first of three volumes, The First World War: Volume 1: To Arms in 2001 to wide acclaim and is acknowledged as one of the world's authorities on the subject. Accompanying the print publication of his one-volume survey, The First World War (2004) was a multi-part documentary series for television entitled The First World War, with some episodes being titled after the chapters in the written work. This set was also released on DVD by Image Entertainment.

According to Jonathan Boff, he became "the most influential British historian of the First World War of his generation." He broke through traditional intra-disciplinary boundaries and national borders. He tirelessly encouraged others, both inside academia and out. His impact produces histories of the Great War that are global and multi-dimensional while rooted in the detail of military operations. The results exemplify the new military historiography. Strachan is the editor of the Great Battles series published by Oxford University Press.