Paul Kennedy
Paul Michael Kennedy CBE FBA (born 17 June 1945) is a British historian specialising in the history of international relations, economic power and grand strategy. He is on the editorial board of numerous scholarly journals and writes for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many foreign-language newspapers and magazines. His monthly column on current global issues is distributed worldwide by the Tribune Content Agency.[1]
For other people named Paul Kennedy, see Paul Kennedy (disambiguation).
Paul Kennedy
17 June 1945
He has published on the history of British foreign policy and great power struggles, emphasizing the changing economic power base that undergirds military and naval strength, noting how declining economic power leads to reduced military and diplomatic weight.
Life[edit]
Kennedy was born in Wallsend, Northumberland, and attended St. Cuthbert's Grammar School in Newcastle upon Tyne. Subsequently, he graduated with first-class honours in history from Newcastle University and obtained his doctorate from St Antony's College, Oxford,[2] under the supervision of A. J. P. Taylor and John Andrew Gallagher. He was a member of the History Department at the University of East Anglia between 1970 and 1983. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a former visiting fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. In 2007–2008, Kennedy was the Phillipe Roman Professor of History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics.
In 1983 he was named the J. Richardson Dilworth professor of British History at Yale. He is now also the Director of International Security Studies and along with John Lewis Gaddis and Charles Hill, teaches the Studies in Grand Strategy course there. In 2012, Professor Kennedy began teaching a course at Yale entitled "Military History of the West Since 1500", elaborating on his presentation of military history as inextricably intertwined with economic power and technological progress.
His most well known book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, assesses the interaction between economics and strategy over the past five centuries. The book was very well received by fellow historians, with A. J. P. Taylor labelling it "an encyclopaedia in itself" and Sir Michael Howard crediting it as "a deeply humane book in the very best sense of the word".[3][4]
It has been translated into 23 languages.
In his 2006 book The Parliament of Man, Kennedy contemplates the past and future of the United Nations.
In 2010 he delivered the first Lucy Houston Lecture in Cambridge on the subject of "Innovation and Industrial Regeneration".[5][6]
Honours[edit]
Kennedy was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1989 and the American Philosophical Society in 1991.[7][8] He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2001 and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003. The National Maritime Museum awarded him its Caird Medal in 2005 for his contributions to naval history. Kennedy was named the US Naval War College's Hattendorf Prize Laureate for 2014.[9]