Professor David Reynolds

Emeritus Professor of International History at Faculty of History, University of Cambridge

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David Reynolds is Emeritus Professor of International History and a Fellow of Christ's College. He studied at Cambridge and Harvard Universities and has been a regular visitor to the United States since first going there as a graduate student in 1973. He served as Chairman of the Faculty of History in 2013-15.

His visiting positions include posts at Harvard, Nihon University in Tokyo, and Sciences Po in Paris. He won the Wolfson Prize for History, 2004, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005.

His most recent books are Island Stories: Britain and its History in the Age of Brexit (HarperCollins, 2019) and The Kremlin Letters: Stalin's Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt (Yale University Press, 2018 - see weblink above), on which he collaborated with Prof. Vladimir Pechatnov (MGIMO, Moscow).

David Reynolds is the author of twelve books, and five edited or co-edited volumes. Over the last few years he has published The Long Shadow (2013) - on the legacies of the Great War for the 20th century - about which he talks on the youtube clip above. This was awarded the 2014 Hessell-Tiltman Prize. Transcending the Cold War (2016) is a major international study of summitry in the 1970s and 1980s, which grew out of a conference supported by grants from the British Academy and CRASSH.

He has also written and presented thirteen historical documentaries for BBC TV, ranging across the international history of the 20th century, including a three-part series for BBC2 'Long Shadow' based on his book (see link above), and a trilogy for BBC4 about the Big Three leaders of World War Two - all now available as DVDs or on Netflix. He also wrote and presented the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series America, Empire of Liberty (2008-9).

He reflected on some of the achievements of academic history today and also on what can get lost if history becomes too ‘academic’ in the 2019 Ramsay Murray Lecture at Selwyn College, Cambridge, on 10 May 2019 entitled 'History: Academic, Personal and Public'. For an audio of the talk, please go to http://www.sel.cam.ac.uk/news/ramsay-murray-lecture-2019/