Guide to Policy-Relevant Courses

Barry Strauss

Corliss Page Dean Senior Fellow

Barry Strauss is the Corliss Page Dean Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies Emeritus at Cornell University, where he taught for over four decades.

Strauss is a military and naval historian with a focus on ancient Greece and Rome and their lessons for today. “No one presents the military history of the ancient world with greater insight and panache than Strauss,” wrote Publishers Weekly. His books have been translated into twenty languages and include several bestsellers. His The Battle of Salamis (2004), Masters of Command (2012), Ten Caesars (2019), and The War that Made the Roman Empire (2022), all appeared on best books of the year lists. His latest book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, will be published by Simon & Schuster in August 2025. He is Series Editor of Princeton’s Turning Points in Ancient History. He also served as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale and a B.A. from Cornell.

Strauss is a a winner of the 2025 Bradley Prize, honoring his lifelong dedication to the study and teaching of Western civilization and classical and military history. In recognition of his scholarship, Strauss was elected to membership of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters. He received Italy's Lucio Colletti Journalism Prize for Literature in 2015. He was named an Honorary Citizen of Salamis, Greece in 2012. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Korea Foundation, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and the American Academy in Rome. See Strauss's personal website.

Judy N. Liu

Student

Judy N. Liu is a junior majoring in history and minoring in political science at Stanford University. Her research interest is in early twentieth century German history with a focus on World I and World War II. She is also interested in studying the history of the laws of war. She is a research assistant to Joseph Ledford's project examining the use and misuses of history in decision-making in foreign policy.

Lucian Staiano-Daniels

Research Fellow

Lucian Staiano-Daniels is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers During the Era of the Thirty Years War (Cambridge University Press, 2024). As a historian, he is interested in the structural similarities in warfare between the early modern period and the present day. He comments on modern international affairs for magazines such as Foreign Policy.

Staiano-Daniels conducts research on the history of violent conflict during the early modern period (1500–1700), focusing on the daily lives of common soldiers and the women with them. Because many of these people were illiterate, or the writings they left behind often did not survive, his methodology includes the critical reading of sources like legal documents and trial transcripts to obtain glimpses of life inside early modern regiments.

But these unknown individuals also lived within massive social and economic developments: global movements of people, money, and goods; demographic changes; and changes in the organization of fiscal-military systems. Staiano-Daniels seeks to study these systems through methods that take larger, statistical views of human life. Studying human life at both the micro and the macro scales reveals the many ways that the early modern period is the "hinge" of history, in which the world we live in took shape. The War People, his first book, situates a single regiment from mustering-in to collapse within its larger demographic and economic contexts.

Staiano-Daniels has a BA in the Great Books and an MA in Eastern classics from St John's College, and an MA from New York University in interdisciplinary studies and social thought. He earned his PhD in history from UCLA under David Sabean. His methods include social history, microhistory, economic history, intellectual history, and the Annales School.