Alan Sked

Professor Alan Sked was a prize-winning undergraduate at the University of Glasgow after which he moved on to Merton College, Oxford, where he took his D.Phil. under the supervision of A.J.P.Taylor. He was appointed to the Department of International History at LSE before his thesis was completed. He remained at the department until his retirement in 2015.

He has been asked by British, Czech and Austrian Funding Councils to evaluate multi-million pound research projects and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is a member of the advisory board of two historical journals. From 1980-1990, he was Convener of European Studies at LSE.

Professor Alan Sked's main fields of interest are very wide-ranging. He is a world expert on the Habsburg Monarchy, with his books on it translated into German, Italian, Czech, Portuguese and Japanese.

He was historical consultant to the BBC documentaryAbraham Lincoln: Saint or Sinner and has published a book, entitled Abraham Lincoln: the Critical History of an American Icon (2013).

Recent conference papers have been devoted to Talleyrand and the Congress of Vienna (given in Paris) and Talleyrand and England (given at the National Archives).

Professor Alan Sked was presented with a copy of the Czech translation of his book, Metternich and Austria: An Evaluation, at a ceremony for the history faculty and students of Masaryk University in Brno. He marked the occasion with a guest lecture on ‘Metternich and Radetzky’.

Expertise Details Hapsburg Empire; Modern Europe and United States