Jeremy Black (historian)

British historian (born 1955)

Jeremy Black (born 30 October 1955) is a British historian, writer, and former professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US. Black is the author of over 180 books, principally but not exclusively on 18th century British politics and international relations, and has been described by one commentator as "the most prolific historical scholar of our age". He has published on military and political history, including Warfare in the Western World, 1882–1975 (2001) and The World in the Twentieth Century (2002).

Black studied at Queens' College Cambridge, St John's College Oxford, and Merton College Oxford before joining Durham University as a lecturer in 1980. There he earned his PhD and subsequently a professorship in 1994. His doctoral thesis was entitled British Foreign Policy 1727–1731, and completed in 1983. As a staff candidate he was not attached to any of the Durham colleges. He has served on the Council of the British Records Association (1989–2005); the Council of the Royal Historical Society (1993–1996 and 1997–2000); and the Council of the List and Index Society (from 1997). He has sat on the editorial boards of History Today, International History Review, Journal of Military History, Media History and the Journal of the Royal United Service Institution (now the RUSI Journal).

In 2008, he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement as afforded by the Society for Military History.

(See also a 2006 talk at Ohio State University about this.)