Annual Booklist 2023 : Contributors
The SAHR has once again collated book recommendations from leading historians, including Templer prize-winning authors, to provide members with holiday gift and reading ideas. Each historian lists five favourite books on the history of the British army and related forces, in addition to a volume that doesn’t yet exist but should.
Professor Andrew Hopper
Andrew Hopper is Professor of Social and Local History at Kellogg College, Oxford and the Principal Investigator of the Civil War Petitions Project. He is the author of ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007), and Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides in the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 2012). He is currently working on his third monograph, Widowhood and Bereavement during the English Civil Wars, based on evidence from the Civil War Petitions website www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk
Dr Daniel Cowling
Daniel Cowling is a Historian at the National Army Museum in London. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he wrote a thesis on the British occupation of Germany after the Second World War. He recently published his first book, Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans (Head of Zeus, 2023).
Dr Christina Welsch
Dr Christina Welsch is an Associate Professor of History and a Department Chair and Professor of South Asian Studies at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Her book The Company's Sword: The East India Company and the Politics of Militarism, 1644–1858 (2022) was runner-up for SAHR's Templer Best First Book Prize and co-winner of the John Ben Snow Prize awarded by the North American Conference on British Studies.
Dr Luke Reynolds
Dr Luke Reynolds, FRHistS, is an Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut, Stamford Campus. His recent book, Who Owned Waterloo? Battle, Memory, & Myth in British History, 1815-1852 (Oxford University Press, 2022), was highly commended in the Templer Best First Book competition and won the Society for Military History 2023 Distinguished Book Award in the First Book Category.
Dr Andrew Wheale
Andrew Wheale has enjoyed a life-long interest in military history and lives in Oxfordshire. His research interests include the World Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, Special Forces, combat effectiveness, leadership and military technology. In 2019 he was awarded his DPhil by the University of Buckingham. He is a member of the British Commission for Military History and the Society of Army Historical Research. His own volume, Ham & Jam: 6th Airborne Division in Normandy - Generating Combat Effectiveness (Helion, 2022), won the SAHR Templer First Book Prize in 2022.
Dr Nicole Hartwell
Dr Nicole M. Hartwell is a National Army Museum research fellow at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the history of collecting and collections, military memorialisation and representations of warfare and imperial scenes in British art. She obtained her DPhil in Modern British and Imperial History from the University of Oxford (Lincoln College) and is currently writing her first book.
Dr Michael Taylor
Michael Taylor is an independent scholar and an experienced museum professional now working freelance. His first degree, in geology, was awarded by the University of Wales in 1974, followed by a MA in British First World War Studies from the University of Birmingham in 2007 and a PhD from the same institution in 2017. He is a member of the British Commission for Military History, the Society for Army Historical Research and the Douglas Haig Fellowship, and is a Fellow of the Museums Association. He has lived near Perth, Scotland for many years and was a founder member and current Chair of the Tayside Branch, Western Front Association. His recent book, entitled No Bad Soldiers: 119 Infantry Brigade and Brigadier-General Frank Percy Crozier in the Great War, was shortlisted for the 2022 SAHR First Book Prize.