Career Details 

Gary Sheffield is Professor of War Studies at University of Birmingham, having been appointed to this newly-established Chair in 2006. He read History at the University of Leeds, which was followed by an MA (by research) at the same university. In 1985 he became a lecturer in the Department of War Studies, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He studied for a part-time PhD at King’s College London (KCL), which he was awarded in 1994. Gary Sheffield moved to the Joint Services Command and Staff College (JSCSC) in 1999 as Senior Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London and Land Warfare Historian on the Higher Command and Staff Course (HCSC). In 2005 KCL awarded him a Personal Chair as Professor of Modern History.

Sheffield has been fortunate in his teachers and colleagues over the years. He received an excellent grounding in his subject from Edward M. Spiers and Hugh Cecil at Leeds and Brian Bond at KCL, and was privileged to work in the War Studies Department at Sandhurst alongside some of the Britain’s finest military historians. Likewise, working alongside academic and military colleagues at the JSCSC - especially with the colonels and brigadiers and their naval and RAF equivalents on the HCSC - was an immensely rewarding experience.

Current Research 

The next project is a book provisionally entitled Douglas Haig and the British Army. This combines a conventional biography with a study of the Army during Haig’s career. It emphasises Haig’s role as a regimental officer, staff officer, and military bureaucrat as well as a commander, and sets him into the context of the so-called ‘learning curve’ debate. Sheffield is also researching Citizen Army, a book that examines the experience of the ordinary British and Commonwealth soldier during the Second World War.

Past Research 

Originally, Gary Sheffield’s major research interest lay in the social history of the British Army in the First World War. His PhD was concerned with the role of the officer-man relationship in the maintenance of morale and discipline (published as: Leadership in the Trenches: Officer-Man Relations, Morale and Discipline in The British Army in the Era of the First World War (Macmillan, 2000). He has also researched and published on leadership, command and generalship; and on perceptions of the First World War in modern British media and popular culture. In 1994 he published the authorised history of the Royal Military Police: The Redcaps: A History of the Royal Military Police and its Antecedents from the Middle Ages to the Gulf War (Brassey's).

Teaching 

Gary Sheffield teaches a range of courses, including at undergraduate level courses on the reputation of Douglas Haig, the origins of the First World War, and the British Home Front in the Second World War. He contributes to the MA courses in First World War Studies and Second World War Studies. He is currently supervising postgraduates researching aspects of airpower, the British Army in the First World War and the US army in the Second World War.

Postgraduate Supervision 

These are the fields in which Gary Sheffield is willing to offer supervision for postgraduate research students:

The British Army in the 20^th century

British social and political history in the era of the two world wars.

British, Commonwealth, and US military history of the 19^th, 20^th and 21^st centuries (especially land and air power)

Select Publications 

Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters 1914-1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Phoenix, 2006 [paperback]). Co-editor with John Bourne

Forgotten Victory: The First World War - Myths and Realities (Headline, 2001; Review, 2002 [paperback]).

Leadership and Command: The Anglo-American Military Experience Since 1861 (Brassey's, 1996; new edition, 2002).

‘The Australians at Pozières: Command and Control on the Somme, 1916’. In David French and Brian Holden Reid (eds.) The British General Staff: Innovation and Reform (Cass, 2003) [This book was awarded the Templer Prize]

‘Reflections on the Experience of British Generalship’ In John Bourne, Peter Liddle and Ian Whitehead (eds.) The Great World War 1914-45 Vol. I (HarperCollins, 2000)

'The Shadow of the Somme: the Influence of the First World War on British Soldiers' Perceptions and Behaviour in the Second World War', in Paul Addison and Angus Calder, (ed.), Time to Kill: the Soldier's Experience of War in the West 1939-1945 (Pimlico, 1997)

'Oh! What a Futile War: Perceptions of the First World War in Modern British Media and Culture' in Susan L. Carruthers and Ian Stewart  (eds.), War, Culture and the Media (Flicks Books, 1996)