Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
Help Desk: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ras/portico/helpdesk
- Professor of German History and Politics
- SELCS
- Faculty of Arts & Humanities


I am currently working on the following projects:
1) The Violence of War
Published works include Absolute War: Violence and Mass Warfare in the German Lands, 1792-1820 (OUP, 2017), The People's Wars: Histories of Violence in the German Lands, 1820-1888 (OUP, 2017), Combatants, Civilians and Cultures of Violence (a special issue of History, 2016), Making Sense of Military Violence (a special issue of Cultural History, 2017, co-edited with Matthew D'Auria), and Making Sense of Violence: Intellectuals, Writers and Modern Warfare (a co-edited special issue of the European Review of History, 2018).
2) Birth of a Nation: Germany, 1848-1888
I have published one volume of this project to date: Nationalism in Germany, 1848-1866: Revolutionary Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 'The Old Forms are Breaking Up, ... Our New Germany is Rebuilding Itself': Constitutionalism, Nationalism and the Creation of a German Polity during the Revolutions of 1848-49' came out in the English Historical Review in 2010.
3) Nationalism, Globalization and Europeanism
Publications include Germany and the Modern World, 1880-1914 (CUP, 2018), Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917-1957 (Berghahn, 2012), co-edited with Matthew D'Auria, and What is a Nation? Europe, 1789-1914 (OUP, 2006), co-edited with Timothy Baycroft.
4) International Relations and the Outbreak of the First World War
Publications: Germany and the Causes of the First World War (Bloomsbury, 2004) and 'Germany and France before the First World War: A Reassessment of Wilhelmine Foreign Policy', English Historical Review, 115 (2000).
5) Historical Theory
Publications: History and Causality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and, with E. Akyeampong, C. Arni, P. K. Crossley and W. H. Sewell, 'Explaining Historical Change; or, The Lost History of Causes', American Historical Review, 120 (2015).
PhD Students (Completed)
Primary Supervision
Nimrod Ben-Cnaan, A Comparative Study of Tropes of Cultural Pessimism in Postwar Britain and France (2008)
Mark Tilse, Transnationalism in the Prussian East, 1871-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
Jan Vermeiren, The First World War and German National Identity: The Dual Alliance at War (CUP, 2016)
Emmeline Burdett, The Continent of Murder: Disability and the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ Programme in the Euthanasia Debates of Britain and the United States, 1945-present (2011)
Matthew D’Auria, The Shaping of French National Identity: Narrating the Nation’s Past, 1715-1830 (CUP, 2021)
Lara Silberklang, Holocaust Survivors: Experiences of Displacement and Narratives of Self (2012)
John Goddard, Lokalisten and Sozialdemokraten: ‘Localist’ Trade Unionism in the German Building Industry, 1868-1893 (2015)
Ken Cheng, Proletarian Revolution and the Crisis of Modernity: German Orthodox Marxism and French Revolutionary Syndicalism,1889-1914 (2017)
Asmaa Soliman, European Muslims Transforming the Public Sphere: Religious Participation in the Arts, Media and Civil Society (Routledge, 2018)
Secondary Supervision
History of Nazi Germany: Helen Whatmore, Julia Wagner, Julie Deering-Kraft, Tiia Sahrakorpi
History of the GDR and FRG: Mark Fenemore, Jeannette Madarasz, Merrilyn Thomas, Daniel Wilton, Damian Mac Con Uladh, Angela Brock, Esther von Richthofen, George Last, Christiane Wienand
Social Theory: Jon Bailes, Colette Vesey
01-OCT-2014 | Professor of German History and Politics | ESPS/SELCS | UCL, United Kingdom |
01-SEP-2005 – 01-SEP-2020 | Senior Lecturer in German History and Politics | German/ESPS | UCL, United Kingdom |
01-SEP-1998 – 01-SEP-2005 | Lecturer in German History and Politics | German/ESPS | UCL, United Kingdom |
1995 | Doctorate. | University of Oxford | |
1990 | Bachelor of Arts (Honours) | University of Oxford |