About our staff

Director of Quality

I completed my BA, MPhil and PhD in History at Cambridge. I was also a visiting student at Rice University in 2005-6, a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University in 2008-9 and a pensionnaire étranger (overseas scholar) at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 2010-11.

My doctoral thesis - completed in 2011 - was awarded the Cambridge History Faculty's Prince Consort and Thirlwall Prize, and Seeley Medal for the best dissertation across all periods.

Shortly after finishing my PhD, I took up a position as a Departmental Lecturer in Modern European History in the Faculty of History and Balliol College, Oxford. In 2012, I returned to Cambridge as a Research Fellow in French Political History at St John's College. I came to Edinburgh in September 2013 as a Chancellor’s Fellow in History. I served as director of the Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History from 2017-2020, and I was promoted to Reader in 2018.

Reviews editor, Contemporary European History

Advisory Panel, H-France

Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities, Discipline+ Catalyst representative for history at the University of Edinburgh

Arts and Humanities Research Council, Peer Review College

You will find more details about my publications and research on my personal homepage.

Summary of research interests

• Europe

• Comparative & Global History
• Culture
• Ethnicity
• Ideas
• Imperialism
• Labour
• Language & Literature
• Migration
• Politics
• Society

• Twentieth Century & After

My research has, for the most part, touched on three main areas: the transformation of French politics since the 1970s, Franco-British relations in the 20th century and the legacy of postcolonialism in France. This has resulted in a number of publications on contemporary French political culture, the 'Anglo-Saxon' in modern French thought, and French conceptions of the nation, the citizen and the secular. I have also worked on French theories of multiculturalism, the politics of postcolonialism and neo-liberal thought.

Those interested in learning a little more about my work to date might like to watch my 'Research in a Nutshell' video or my 2015 Edinburgh Festival lecture on contemporary French politics.

Although I continue to work on France, my current research is focused on Eric Hobsbawm and the global history of Marxism. 

My current research in European history is divided into two main areas.

The first is a project on the global history of Marxism, told through the lens of the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. This will result in a substantial intellectual biography to be published by Harvard University Press. The aim will be to situate Hobsbawm's life and work within twentieth-century European and global history, as well as explore his political and historical ideas. I want to bring out different aspects of his intellectual trajectory – from his interest in jazz to his commitment to Communism – and place these within a broader narrative of intellectual engagement, political responsibility and global thinking in the twentieth-century. Alongside this biographical project, I recently launched the Eric Hobsbawm Bibliography, which is the first comprehensive, text-searchable bibliography of Hobsbawm's published and unpublished works. 

In the longer-term, I would like to explore the dynamics of Marxist political and intellectual engagement in the twentieth century. Drawing on interviews with Marxist intellectuals in France, Germany, the UK, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Peru and India, I hope to gain a better understanding of how Marxist ideas have interacted with worlds of sociability, friendship networks and political activism in different contexts. 

The second is a continuation of my work on French political culture. This was the subject of both my first monograph, entitled A Divided Republic: nation, state and citizenship in contemporary France (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and my most recent book, France (Polity Press, 2020). I am interested in different aspects of French political culture, especially those that relate to the meaning of the nation, the definition of the citizen, the reform of the state and the historiography of modern France. Contrary to the widely-held view that political participation and engagement have atrophied in France since the 1980s, I suggest in my work that we need a more open and imaginative definition of politics in order to capture the complexity of contemporary political allegiances and debates. 

I also have a more focused interests in specific aspects of French intellectual and political history. I have worked, for instance, on the tension between neo-liberal and anti-capitalist thought in France, especially in the writings of thinkers like André Gorz and Luc Boltanski. At a more local level, I have written about the politics of Montpellier and the surrounding region since the 1960s. This includes topics such as the importance of municipal politics, especially in the larger-than-life figure of Georges Frêche, mayor of Montpellier from the late 1970s to the early 2000s; the management of ethnic minorities in Montpellier, including the European exile population from Algeria (the pieds-noirs); and the impact of identity politics and postcolonial memory. 

In the summer of 2017, I was awarded a major AHRC Leadership Fellowship (£141,152) to pursue my work on Eric Hobsbawm. This will give me extended periods of research leave from 2017-2019 and allow me to undertake extensive fieldwork. This grant follows on from an earlier Carnegie Research Incentive Grant (2015-7) for the same project.

I am also involved in a number of research projects on migration and citizenship. I am a co-investigator on a large ESRC-funded project (£525,817) entitled 'Seeing Illegal Immigrants: state monitoring and political rationality' with fellow investigator Christina Boswell. The aim of the project is to understand better how and why European states gather data about 'illegal' migration and how this has changed since the 1970s. The project will run for two years (until mid-2018) and will include a number of publications and events based on the project findings. 

Another smaller project in this field is a collaborative initiative between the University of Edinburgh and the Migrinter research centre at the Université de Poitiers in France. Most recently, this led to an interdisciplinary workshop on the Mediterranean in May 2015, sponsored by the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni and the Centre for the Study of Modern Conflict at Edinburgh. 

In 2011-2012, I completed a research project on contemporary France entitled 'French politics in an age of uncertainty'. This resulted in an international workshop held at the Maison Française d'Oxford in September 2012 and an edited book (see above under 'Books'). Details of the workshop can be found here. 

• Making of the Modern World 
• Themes in Modern European History
• Historical Skills and Methods I ('Nations and nationalism'
• Historical Skills and Methods II ('Race, immigration and colonialism in French film')
• Undergraduate dissertations
• France since 1940 (option course)
• The Marxist Imagination in Europe, c.1950-present (option course)
• Dreams and nightmares: the culture and politics of postwar Europe (special subject)

• Writing History: Theory and Practice
• Historical Methodology ('Writing contemporary history')
• Historical Research: Sources and Skills ('Interpreting film')
• Revolutions in the Twentieth Century
• An Uncertain World: the West since the 1970s

I am very happy to supervise Masters and PhD students. I will also gladly consider co-supervision with other schools (Social and Political Sciences, French etc.) and/or cross-institutional supervision (including co-tutelle with European universities). Please contact me if you have an idea or are thinking of applying to study at Edinburgh.

I welcome applications in any of the following fields:

• any aspect of 20th and 21st century French history, politics and intellectual history 
• French imperial history in the 20th century, especially the legacies of empire 
• the life and work of Eric Hobsbawm and other postwar British/European Marxist thinkers  
• theoretical and historical approaches to the study of neo-liberalism
• nationalism, national myths, and national narratives