William Arthur Speck (11 January 1938, Bradford – 15 February 2017, Carlisle) was a British historian who specialised in late 17th and 18th-century British and American history.
He was educated at Bradford Grammar School before winning a scholarship to The Queen's College, Oxford, where he gained a BA in 1960 and a D.Phil.
[3] Speck moved to Carlisle in order to be closer to the source material for his biography of Robert Southey, which was published by Yale University Press in 2006.
The book was well reviewed and resulted in Speck being appointed Honorary Professor in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham, which he held from 2006 until 2012.
[3] Here, he co-convened an Interdisciplinary Eighteenth-Century Research Seminar.