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Professor of Modern European History, Trinity College Dublin

My research focuses on the history of twentieth-century France and the Great War in a comparative and transnational perspective. I began as a social and labour historian but have more recently explored the uses of cultural history as a way of opening up new perspectives on the First World War without believing in the exclusivity of any one approach. I am currently writing a history of the French experience in the Great War. I am a board member of the Research Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, and I participate in EURHISTXX, a consortium of research institutes across Europe, which explores writing the contemporary history of Europe at a continental level. From 2008 to 2010 I co-directed (with Professor Robert Gerwarth) a research project on ‘Paramilitary Violence after the Great War, 1917-1923: Towards a Global Perspective,’ which was funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and which resulted in, among other outputs, a Oxford University Press book, to be published in 2012. I have been visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, and in 2005 was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Experience

  • –present
    Professor of Modern European History, Trinity College Dublin