Geoffrey Parker (historian)


Noel Geoffrey Parker, FBA is a British historian specialising in the history of Western Europe, Spain, and warfare during the early modern era. His best known book is Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1988.
He holds his BA, MA, PhD and Litt.D. degrees from Cambridge University where he studied under the historian Sir John Huxtable Elliott.
Parker has taught at the University of Illinois, the University of St. Andrews and Yale University. He is currently the Andreas Dorpalen Professor of History at The Ohio State University.
Parker was a consultant and main contributor on the BBC series, Armada: 12 Days to Save England.

Honours

Parker is a Fellow of the British Academy. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
In 2014, Parker was awarded the British Academy Medal for his book Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century.
Amongst the foreign honours he holds, he is a member of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise and was granted the Great Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic by the Spanish government. He has received honorary doctorates from the Catholic University of Brussels and the University of Burgos. He is also a corresponding member of the Spanish Real Academia de la Historia, and fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences since 2005. In 2012 he was awarded the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for History by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for his outstanding scholarship on the social, political and military history of Europe between 1500 and 1650, in particular Spain, Philip II, and the Dutch Revolt; for his contribution to military history in general; and for his research on the role of climate in world history.
In 1999, he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement given by the Society for Military History.

Major works