W A Speck

William Arthur Speck (born Bradford,11 January 1938; died Carlisle, 15 February 2017) was a British historian who specialized in late 17th and 18th-century British and American history.

He was educated at Bradford Grammar School and The Queen's College, Oxford, gaining a BA in 1960 and a D.Phil in 1966. He began his career with a tutorial fellowship at the University of Exeter and moved to a lectureship at Newcastle University the following year. He was appointed to the G. F. Grant Professorship of History at the University of Hull in 1981 and in 1984 he became the Chair in Modern History at the University of Leeds, retiring in 1997 to become Emeritus Professor of History. From 2006-2012 he was an Honorary Professor in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham where he co-convened an Interdisciplinary Eighteenth-Century Research Seminar. He was president of the Historical Association from 1999-2002.