Barry S. Strauss is an American historian.
Education
Strauss holds a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell and a Doctor of Philosophy from Yale (advised by Donald Kagan) and has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the American Academy in Rome, the MacDowell Colony for the Arts, the of Korea Foundation, and the Killam Foundation of Canada.
Career
He is a Professor of History and Classics at Cornell University and chair of its history department. He is an expert on ancient military history and has written or edited numerous books, including The Battle of Salamis (2004), The Trojan War (2006), The Spartacus War (2009), Masters of Command (2013), and The Death of Caesar (2015). His books have been translated into six languages.
He is Director of Cornell"s Program on Freedom and Free Societies and past Director of its Peace Studies Program.
Strauss is editor of The Princeton History of the Ancient World, a series of books from Princeton University Press. He sits on the editorial boards of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society, The International Journal of the Classical Tradition, and Strategika.
At Cornell, he teaches courses on the history of ancient Greece, war and peace in the ancient world, history of battle, introduction to military history, and specialized topics in ancient history. Strauss is an avid rower.
In 1999 he published, Rowing Against the Current: On Learning to Scull at Forty (Scribner).
He has appeared in more than a dozen television documentaries. He has published op-ed pieces in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, United States of America Today, and Newsday, been interviewed on National Public Radio and the British Broadcasting Corporation, and has been quoted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and in other major newspapers. He lives in Ithaca, New New York