Bio
About Me
An award-winning historian of Nelson’s navy, I have written or edited seven books and published articles in several major academic journals. I regularly lecture to local and international groups on the history of the British navy in the age of sail, and I am a frequent guest on podcasts and YouTube videos aimed at that audience. My most popular video, on the accuracy of depictions of the age of sail in Hollywood movies, has been viewed more than 3.3 million times.
I am currently under contract with Oxford University Press to write a biography of Admiral of the Fleet John Jervis, Earl of St. Vincent. The target audience is the Patrick O’Brian set. It is not intended to be an academic book, but my academic work provides the necessary foundation for it. My first book looked at the social background and promotion prospects of British naval officers of Nelson’s generation. It was hailed as “an innovative analysis” that presented “a model for conducting naval history in combination with social and cultural perspectives.” My other scholarly work has broadened my expertise beyond social history to include strategy, operations, and the history of the British army. I have co-edited two books with Paul Kennedy, most recently Planning for War at Sea: 400 Years of Great Power Competition. I won the Sir Julian Corbett Prize in Modern Naval History for an article examining the naval defense of Ireland in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and I co-authored an article that went into considerable detail on Nelson’s conduct during the Trafalgar Campaign. I also edited a forum on naval operations in the West Indies—an important part of St. Vincent’s life—and I suggested a new perspective on Napoleon’s escape from Elba. My second major book followed soldiers and sailors home after the Napoleonic Wars, blending my interest in social history with questions of war termination and British strategy at the beginning of the Pax Britannica.
I received my B.A. from Yale in 2007, my M.Phil from Cambridge in 2008, and my D.Phil from Oxford in 2015. 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. Since that time, I have been a professor in the Hattendorf Historical Center at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. I am also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and 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 seven books, most recently Planning for War at Sea: 400 Years of Great Power Competition (Naval Institute, 2025), which he edited with Paul Kennedy. 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.
