John A. Lynn

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John A. Lynn II (born March 18, 1943) is an American military historian who studies early modern Europe. He was born in Glenview, Illinois. He earned a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1964, an MA from the University of California, Davis in 1967, and a PhD from UCLA in 1973.

Lynn taught briefly at Indiana University and the University of Maine before joining the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1978. He was the Oppenheimer Professor of Warfighting Strategy at the Marine Corps University in 1994–1995. He retired from UIUC in 2009 and taught at Northwestern University for three years as Distinguished Professor of Military History. In 2012 he returned to UIUC as Professor Emeritus of History and as a professor in the Department of Political Science, a role he has continued to hold.

He has won teaching awards, including the Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2001. He served as president of the United States Commission on Military History (2003–2007) and as vice-president of the Society for Military History (2005–2007). He received two foreign honors: Chevalier of the French Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 2004 and Commandeur of the Moroccan Order of Ouissam Alaouite in 2006. In 2017 he received the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society for Military History, the organization’s top career award. In August 2017 he received a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Grant to support research and writing on the history of surrender.