Sir Adolphus William Ward FRHistS FBA (2 December 1837 – 19 June 1924) was an English historian and man of letters.

[1] In 1866, Ward was appointed professor of history and English literature in Owens College, Manchester, and was principal from 1890 to 1897, when he retired.

[4] In 1897, the freedom of the city of Manchester was conferred upon him, he delivered the Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford in 1898, and on 29 October 1900 he was elected master of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

[9] Ward's major work is his standard History of English Dramatic Literature to the Age of Queen Anne (1875),[10] re-edited after a thorough revision in three volumes in 1899.

He also wrote The House of Austria in the Thirty Years' War (1869),[11] Great Britain and Hanover: Some Aspects of the Personal Union (1899),[12] and The Electress Sophia and the Hanoverian Succession (1903) (2nd ed.