Academic Staff
Dr Claire Shaw
Centre Co-Director
(on Maternity Leave)
Specialisms: Modern Russian history, disability history, identity, marginality, history of technology
Charles Walton
Centre Co-Director
Specialisms: Ancient Regime, Enlightenment, Revolutionary France, democratisation, rights and duties, political and socio-economic justice
Professor Christoph Mick
Former Centre Director (2018-21)
Specialisms: Modern German and Eastern European history, especially Poland, Russia, Ukraine; history of science and technology, memorial culture and nation building.
Professor Mark Philp
Former Centre Director (2014-2018)
Specialisms: Political theory and political sociology; political corruption and issues relating to standards in public life; history of political thought and British history at the time of the French Revolution.
Dr Anca Cretu
Specialisms:
Modern Europe (with focus on east-central Europe); Humanitarianism; Development; Migration (with focus on History of Refugees)
Dr Jonathan Davies
Specialisms: Early modern European history, especially violence; the Italian states between 1350 and 1600, especially Tuscany
Dr Anna Hájková
(on Leave until April 2025)
Specialisms:The history of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and modern Central and Eastern Europe; the history of genocide; the history of gender; nationalities; history of everyday life in general
Dr Pierre Purseigle
Specialisms: The comparative history of the First World War and especially on the experience of the French, British, and – to a lesser extent – Belgian populations, wartime mobilization, the experience of refugees, and pictorial humour
Dr Colin Storer
(On Study Leave 2024-2025)
Specialisms: Anglo-German relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the Weimar Republic; European Cultural History in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (especially popular/genre fiction, modernism, and media history)DI Travel
Dr Michael Bycroft
Specialisms: science and technology in early modern Europe, with a special interest in France, state patronage, global connections, and materials such as precious stones, gold, dyestuffs, and porcelain
Professor Rebecca Earle
Specialisms:
Colonial and 19th century Spanish American history, and the global history of food
Dr Claudia Stein
Specialisms: the formation of the modern and postmodern subject since the seventeenth century at the intersection of science and medicine, politics and economy. The role of biopower or biopolitics, as understood by Michel Foucault as the processes by which 'life' emerges as the centre of political strategies, is a key analytical tool to both of my projects.
Professor Beat Kümin
Specialisms: My field is the cultural history of German-speaking Europe and England (c. 1400-1800). In particular, I work on political/religious/social life, food/drink consumption & memory in local communities over the early modern period.
Professor Penny Roberts
Specialisms: the social, cultural, religious and political history of sixteenth-century France, especially the period of its religious wars; peace-making and violence, religious minorities and their networks, truth and secrecy in early modern France and Europe'