Gary Sheffield

Gary Sheffield

Current Role:

Gary Sheffield is Professor of War Studies at University of Birmingham, having been appointed to this newly-established Chair in 2006.

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.  He has a strong interest in SOFO, not least because of his roles as President of the Friends of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, and Regimental Historian of The Rifles.

Previous 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.

Selected 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)


http://www.historycultures.bham.ac.uk/staff/sheffield.shtml