Richard J Evans

Richard J. Evans's general area of research interest is modern German and European history, especially social and cultural history, since the mid-nineteenth century. He has worked on movements of emancipation and liberation, including the feminist movement and the labour movement, on social inequality in the urban environment, on the social history of death and disease, and on crime and punishment, especially the death penalty in German history since the seventeenth century. He also has an interest in historiography and the history of the discipline of history. Since acting as principal expert witness in the David Irving libel trial before the High Court in London in 2000, his work has dealt with Holocaust denial and the clash of epistemologies when history enters the courtroom. He has published a large-scale history of the Third Reich in three volumes, published by Penguin.

He has been Editor of the Journal of Contemporary History since 1998 and a judge of the Wolfson Literary Award for History since 1993. Over the years, his work has won the Wolfson Literary Award for History, the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, and the Hamburg Medaille für Kunst und Wissenschaft.

He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, and an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Birkbeck College, London.

His most recent book is on British historians and the European Continent and he is currently completing a book on the years 1815-1914 for the Penguin History of Europe, which has a section on the making of modern time.

He is PI for the Leverhulme-funded 5-year project on Conspiracy and Democracy.