For the complete list of work and videos, please visit Professor Parker's History Department page

• Curriculum Vitae (pdf)
• Parker's History Department web page

Geoffrey Parker, Distinguished University Professor, Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History, and Senior Fellow of the Mershon Center for International Security, was born in Nottingham, England, in 1943. Parker studied history at Christ’s College Cambridge, earning a BA in 1965, a Ph.D. in 1968, and a Litt.D. in 1981. He has four children and three grandchildren.

After teaching at the Universities of Cambridge, St Andrews (Scotland), and British Columbia (Canada), Parker moved in 1986 to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as Charles E. Nowell Distinguished Professor of History. In 1993, he joined Yale University as Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History before joining the faculty of the OSU History Department and the Mershon Center in January 1997. Parker teaches courses on the history of Reformation Europe and on military history at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He has directed or co-directed 6 Senior Honors essays and 35 Doctoral Dissertations to completion. Parker won an OSU Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award in 2006; the Harlan Hatcher Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research, and Service in 2007; and the Rodica C. Botoman Prize for distinguished undergraduate teaching and mentoring in 2022.

Parker studies the social, political, and military history of Europe between 1500 and 1650, with special reference to Spain and its empire. His first book was The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road. The logistics of Spanish victory and defeat in the Low Countries Wars, 1567-1659 (1972; revised edition 2004; Dutch, Polish, and Spanish translations), which sought to explain why Spain – the only western superpower of its day – failed to suppress the Dutch Revolt. He then published a biography of Philip II (1978, third edition 2002; translated into Czech, Dutch, Italian, Polish, and Spanish), with an expanded version, Felipe II: la biografía definitiva (Barcelona, 2010), now in its tenth printing. In 2014, Yale University Press published Imprudent King: a new life of Philip II (with Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish translations). The book includes much previously unknown material from a cache of 3,000 documents written by or to Philip that Parker found at the Hispanic Society of America in 2012, and cataloged together with two of his former advisees.

Together with Colin Martin (another former graduate advisee), Parker published The Spanish Armada in 1988 (the 400th anniversary), with a revised edition in 1999. In 2022, they published an extensively revised and expanded edition: Armada. The Spanish Enterprise and England’s Deliverance in 1588, with a Spanish translation in 2023.

Parker's other books on early modern Europe include The Dutch Revolt (1977; revised edition, 1984; Dutch, German, and Spanish translations); Europe in Crisis, 1598-1648 (1979; revised edition, 2000; Italian and Spanish translations); The Thirty Years’ War (1984; revised edition, 1997; French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations); and The Grand Strategy of Philip II (1998; Chinese, Spanish, and Turkish translations).

The Military Revolution. Military innovation and the rise of the West, 1500-1800, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1988, won two book prizes. An expanded edition came out in 1996, now in its 20th printing, with Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish translations. Parker plans to publish a third, thoroughly revised edition in 2025.

Parker edited and co-authored both The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare (1995) and The Cambridge History of Warfare (2005, with Chinese, Korean, Polish, and Spanish translations). New editions of both works appeared in 2020, extending the narrative and analysis down to 2018.

Parker is also interested in world history, and edited The Times History of the World (third edition, 1995, many foreign language editions), the third edition of The Times Atlas of World History (1993), and The Times Compact Atlas of World History (fifth edition, 2008, many foreign language editions.)

In 2013, Yale University Press published The Global Crisis: war, climate, and catastrophe in the 17th-century, concerning the climatically-induced crisis that created acute political, economic, intellectual, and social upheaval all around the globe, causing the premature death of around one-third of the human population. Although not the first such worldwide crisis, it is both the most recent and the only one for which plentiful records survive. Parker hopes this study will help inform the current debate on the consequences for human society of sudden climatic change. In 2014, the Society for Military History awarded "The Global Crisis" its “best book” prize, and the British Academy awarded the book one of its “medals” that recognize “a landmark academic achievement in any of the disciplines supported by the Academy, which has transformed understanding of a particular subject or field of study”. Chinese, Dutch, Polish, and Spanish translations have appeared, with a "Revised and abridged" version from Yale in 2017.

In 2019, Yale University Press published Emperor: A new life of Charles V. Dutch, German, Italian, and Spanish translations have appeared, with Chinese, Estonian, Polish, and Turkish translations in preparation. It is also available as an audiobook, and it won the 2020 Ohio Academy of History award for “the outstanding publication of the previous year.”

So far, Parker has authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited 40 books and over 140 articles, review articles, and book chapters.

In 2012, the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences awarded Parker the biennial Heineken Prize for History, open to scholars in any field, any period, and any country.

In 2021, the OSU Board of Trustees awarded Parker the Sullivant Medal, given once every five years “to a member of the university whose achievements have been extraordinary and distinctive.” He is the twentieth recipient, and the third historian, to receive this award since its creation in 1924.

In 2024, the American Historical Association awarded Parker one of three annual lifetime achievement awards for his work.

Parker is a Fellow of the British Academy (1984); of the Real Academia Hispano-Americana de Ciencias, Artes y Letras of Cádiz, Spain (2004); of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017); and of the American Philosophical Society (2023). He holds honorary doctorates from the Vrije Universiteit, Brussels (1990), the Katholieke Universiteit, Brussels (2005); and the Universidad de Burgos (2010). In 1992, the king of Spain made Parker a Caballero Gran Cruz de la Orden de Isabella la Católica.

In Conversation

In December 2022, Dr. Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution joined Parker for a small-group conversation at the Mershon Center. Dr. Hill was one of Parker's undergraduate students at St Andrews University. Parker invited her to reflect on her personal history as a first-generation college student from County Durham - the coal country of northern England -- a journey she has called "From the coal house to the White House".

Media Links

Mershon Center: Two Mershon affiliates named to American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017)
Arts and Sciences: Faculty, Alumnus Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017)
History Department: Parker Leads Workshop at University of Dundee (2016)
Arts and Sciences: Parker elected corresponding fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh (2016)
WOSU: Looking back at World War I (2016)
Arts and Sciences: New Course Offers an Interdisciplinary Approach to Climate Change (2016)
Climate History Podcast: Climate Change and Crisis: Lessons from the Past (2015)
Arts and Sciences: History Begins With How (2015)
Arts and Sciences: Historian’s Ground-Breaking New Biography of Spain’s Most Famous Monarch Published This Week (2014)
Mershon Center: Book Panel on Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2014)
Mershon Center: Mershon, Byrd Polar join forces to launch new initiative on climate (2013)
Heineken Prize videos, Geoffrey Parker: YouTube, Vimeo (2012) 
Arts and Sciences: Heineken Laureate Gives Closing Remarks at International Awards Ceremony (2012)
Mershon Center: Parker Awarded Heineken Prize for Outstanding Scholarship (2012)
The Ohio State University: Commencement Address by Geoffrey Parker (2003)

Mershon Projects

Revising The Military Revolution (2011-13)
The World Crisis: Climate, Catastrophe, and State Breakdown in the 17th Century (2006-08)
Unmaking the West: "What If?" Scenarios That Rewrite World History, with Philip Tetlock (1998-2005)
Ohio and the World (2003)