Bio
About Me
I am an associate professor in the John B. Hattendorf Center for Maritime Historical Research at the U.S. Naval War College. I specialize in the naval history of Britain and other countries from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. I teach an elective and co-direct the Graduate Certificate in Maritime History, and I have also taught in the Strategy and Policy Department. My newest book is The Horrible Peace: British Veterans at the End of the Napoleonic Wars (UMass, 2023). You can read more about it here.
My doctoral research, subsequently published as A Social History of British Naval Officers, 1775–1815 (Boydell, 2017), looked at the social backgrounds and career trajectories of British naval officers in Nelson’s generation. That work also spawned articles in The English Historical Review and the Journal for Maritime Research as well as an edited book in 2019, Eighteenth-Century Naval Officers: A Transnational Perspective.
Since then, I have focused much more on naval strategy and operations, in keeping with my position at the Naval War College. Links to roughly ten articles and chapters on those themes can be found here. One of those articles, on the naval defense of Ireland, won the 2018 Sir Julian Corbett Prize in Modern Naval History. I have also edited several books and collections, beginning with the Festschrift for John Hattendorf, Strategy and the Sea. In 2020, the Naval War College Press published The Hattendorf Prize Lectures, Volume 1: 2011–2019. I also edited a special forum on “Navies in the West Indies in the Age of Sail” in the International Journal of Maritime History.
Paul Kennedy and I have collaborated on two projects, both based on conferences organized through International Security Studies at Yale. We edited Navies in Multipolar Worlds, which was published with Routledge, and we have another project entitled Planning for War at Sea forthcoming with the Naval Institute Press. Along with my teaching responsibilities, these projects have pushed my research into the twentieth century. I published an article on the Battle of the Atlantic in the Journal of Military History, and I am a contributing editor for the Routledge Handbook on the Pacific War.
I received my B.A. from Yale and my M.Phil from Cambridge, after which I taught history at The Haverford School for three years. In 2011, I was awarded a Clarendon Fund Scholarship to the University of Oxford, where I completed my DPhil (PhD) under N.A.M. Rodger. I then served as the Caird Senior Research Fellow at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. From 2016 to 2018, I was Associate Director of International Security Studies and a Lecturer in the History Department at Yale University. In addition to teaching, I oversaw ISS's academic fellowships, conferences, and events. I also worked closely with Paul Kennedy to coordinate ISS’s naval and maritime studies initiative.
I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Vice President of the North American Society for Oceanic History. I also serve on the editorial board of the Mariner’s Mirror, The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord, the Naval Documents of the American Revolution, and the Veterans series with UMass Press.
Winner of the Sir Julian Corbett Prize in Modern Naval History from the Institute of Historical Research, 2018.
Clarendon Fund Scholarship, University of Oxford
Humanities Scholarship, University College, Oxford
Accolades
Evan Wilson is an associate professor in the Hattendorf Historical Center at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. A recipient of the Sir Julian Corbett Prize in Modern Naval History, he researches the naval history of Britain and other countries from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. He is the author or editor of six books, most recently The Horrible Peace: British Veterans and the End of the Napoleonic Wars (UMass, 2023). His next book, which he edited with Paul Kennedy, is Planning for War at Sea: 400 Years of Great Power Competition (Naval Institute, 2025). Before coming to Newport, he was the Caird Senior Research Fellow at the National Maritime Museum (UK) and the Associate Director of International Security Studies at Yale University. He holds degrees from Yale, Cambridge and Oxford.
