Research highlights
View our academic members of staff and their works.
Director of the Centre for the Cultural History of War (CCHW); historian and curator. She is currently leading a major AHRC project Understanding Displacement Aesthetics and Making Change in the Art Gallery with Refugees, Migrants and Host Communities (AHRC, 2021-24).
Other projects
2018- Visual Art, Humanitarianism and Human Rights network and workshops (with Prof. of Contemporary Art, Charles Green, University of Melbourne, Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth).
2018-2021, Art in Conflict: Transforming the Australian War Memorial, (international partner investigator, Australian Research Council grant with Curtin University, UNSW and the University of Melbourne).
Exhibitions
The Sensory War, 1914-2014 (Manchester Art Gallery and Whitworth Art Gallery, 2014-15); Visions of the Front, 1916-18 (Whitworth Art Gallery).
Works
- The Politics of Wounds: Military Patients and Medical Power in the First World War, (Oxford University Press, 2014).
- Gender and Conflict Since 1914: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Palgrave, 2012)
- Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2009)
- ‘The Art of Resilience: Veteran Therapy from the Occupational to the Creative 1914-1945’ in The First World War and Health: Rethinking Resilience. van Bergen, L. & Vermetten, E. (eds.). Leiden: Brill, 2020.
- ‘Butterfly Touch: rehabilitation, nature and the haptic arts in the First World War’, Critical Military Studies, 2019.
- Ana Carden-Coyne and Kate Darian Smith (eds), Young People and the Two World Wars: Visuality, Materiality and Cultural Heritage, special issue Cultural and Social History, 2021.
- ‘Boy Mascots, Orphans and Heroes: the State, the Family and Cultural Heritage’, Cultural and Social History, (in the above special issue, January 2021, pp.1-30.
- Art in Conflict: The Politics of Artists in War Zones (Power publications, 2021).
Bertrand is a leading thinker of war culture, military violence and colonial mentalities, and humanitarianism, and founding member of CCHW.
He is Editor of the European Review of History- revue europeenne d'histoire since 1994. He is also executive director of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, which combines the research interests of colleagues in the humanities and opens a dialogue with humanitarian workers and medical practitioners. He is working on humanitarian medical aid in conflicts and in post-conflict societies, most recently on Cambodia.
Works
- Amidst the Debris: Humanitarianism and the End of Liberal Order, (with Espada, Fiori, Rigon and Sakaria)Hurst, 2021.
- Humanitarian Desire, Masculine Character and Heroics’, in Gendering Global Humanitarianism in the C20th (Palgrave 2020)
- The Charity Market and Humanitarianism in Britain, 1870-1912 (with Strange and Roddy, Bloomsbury 2018).
- 'L'humanitaire spectacle? Corps blessés et souffrance durant le siège de Paris’ Revue d’histoire du dix-neuvième siècle, no 60, (2020) 1, 177-90.
- ‘Demotic Humanitarians: Historical perspectives on the global reach of local initiatives, Third World Quarterly, 1781-1798, 2019
- 2017. ‘L’affaire Voulet-Chanoine dans le sillage de l’affaire Dreyfus’. Massacre et tournant humanitaire’, Les Temps Modernes, 693-694, 28-43.
- Between the border and a hard place: negotiating protection and humanitarian aid after the Genocide in Cambodia, 1979-1999. In M. Barnett ed., Human Rights and Humanitarianism, Cambridge University Press, (2020), pp. 219-234.
- Read, Róisín, Bertrand Taithe, and Roger Mac Ginty. "Data hubris? Humanitarian information systems and the mirage of technology." Third World Quarterly (2016): 1-18.
- ‘The Making of the Origins of Humanitarianism?’, Contemporanea, Vol. 18, (2015) 3: 489-96.
- 2016, ‘Danger, Risk, Security and Protection: Concepts at the Heart of the History of Humanitarian Aid’, in Fabrice Weissman & Michael Neuman eds, Saving Lives and Staying Alive, Hurst, 2016, 37-53.
- The Killer Trail: a colonial scandal in the heart of Africa (Oxford University press, 2011)
- Evil, Barbarism and Empire: Britain and Abroad, 1830-2000 (with Gill and Cook, Palgrave 2011).
- French Masculinities, 1700-2000 (ed. with Chris Forth), (Palgrave 2007).
- The Algerian past of French History (University of Renne Press, 2006)
- Citizenship and Wars: France in Turmoil, 1870-1871, (Routledge, 2001).
- Defeated Flesh: Medicine, Welfare, and Warfare in the Making of Modern France, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
- War: Identities in Conflict, 1300-2000, Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton (Eds), (Sutton Publishing 1998).
Dr Max Jones teaches modern history at the University of Manchester. He is affiliated with the Centre for the Cultural History of War and has won a Distinguished Achievement Medal as the University’s Teacher of the Year.
His book The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott’s Antarctic Sacrifice (Oxford, 2003) and new edition of Scott’s Journals (Oxford, 2006) established his reputation as a leading expert on Scott of the Antarctic, exploration and national heroes.
He has collaborated on a number of museum and media projects about Scott and heroes, including ‘The Secrets of Scott’s Hut’ (BBC TV, 2011), the London Natural History Museum’s exhibition on ‘Scott’s Last Expedition’ (2011-12), and 'Conquest and Calamity: The Timewatch Guide to Explorers' (BBC TV, 2017). He is an accredited lecturer with The Arts Society and speaks regularly to public audiences about the cultural history of war.
Works
- The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott's Antarctic Sacrifice, (Oxford University Press, 2003).
- ‘Exploration, Celebrity and the Making of a Transnational Hero: Fridtjof Nansen and the Fram expedition’, Journal of Modern History (forthcoming, March 2021).
- ‘“National Hero and Very Queer Fish”: Empire, Sexuality and the British Remembrance of General Gordon, 1918–72’, Twentieth Century British History 26:2 (2015).
- Special issue on ‘Decolonising Imperial Heroes', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42:4 (2014).
Max is currently writing his next book for Oxford University Press, A New History of British Heroes, which will examine how and why ideas about national heroes have changed over the last three hundred years.
Jean-Marc Dreyfus is Reader in History at the University of Manchester. He is a specialist of the economic and diplomatic aspects of the Holocaust and post-war reparations. He also works and looted art in the Holocaust and the unfinished restitution process.
He is the author of six monographs, including L’impossible réparation. Déportés, biens spoliés, or nazi, comptes bloqués, criminels de guerre (The impossible réparation. Deportees, looted properties, Nazi gold, war criminals), Paris, Flammarion, January 2015.
His interests are: Genocide studies/anthropology of genocide; History of the Jews in Europe (19th-20th Century); History of Jews in France (19th-20th Century); Economic history of France and Germany; Holocaust memory; politics of memory; Modern history of Alsace; Rebuilding post-war societies.
Works
- Vollrath. De Hitler à Adenauer, un ambassadeur entre deux mondes (Paris: Vendémiaire, Sept. 2020).
- L’impossible réparation. Déportés, biens spoliés, or nazi, comptes bloqués, criminels de guerre (The impossible reparation. Deportees, looted properties, Nazi gold, war criminals) (Paris: Flammarion, January 2015).
- ‘Corpses of the Holocaust’, an issue of Human Remains and Violence. An Interdisciplinary Journal, 6:1, July 2020.
- Human remains and mass violence. Methodological approaches, with Elisabeth Anstett (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).
- ‘Une époque terrible et terriblement intéressante’. Le journal de Lucien Dreyfus, 20 décembre 1940-24 septembre 1943, presented and annotated with Alexandra Garbarini (Paris : Le manuscrit, June 2018). Forthcoming in English in 2021.
- Human Remains in society. Curation and exhibition in the aftermath of genocide and mass-violence, with Elisabeth Anstett, series “Human remains and violence” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).
Laure Humbert works on the history of humanitarian aid, gender and population displacements. She examines everyday encounters between French officials, members of new international organizations, relief workers, defeated Germans and Displaced Persons, who remained in the territory of the French occupation zone in the aftermath of the Second World War. (Reinventing French Aid: The Politics of Humanitarian Relief in French-Occupied Germany, 1945-1952, Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Her current project examines international medical cooperation in an AHRC funded project on Colonial and Transnational Intimacies: Medical Humanitarianism in the French external Resistance, 1940-1945 (with Bertrand Taithe and Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps, University of Geneva). She is also working as a research fellow on the Researching the Impact of Attacks on Healthcare (RIAH) project.
Follow Laure on Twitter or email laure.humbert@manchester.ac.uk
Website project: https://colonialandtransnationalintimacies.com/about/
Works
- Reinventing French Aid: The politics of humanitarian relief in French-occupied Germany, 1945-1952, (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, 2021).
- ‘The French in exile and Post-war International relief, c. 1941-1945’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 61, No. 4 (2018), pp. 1041-1064.
- ‘French Politics of Relief and International Aid: France, UNRRA and the Rescue of European Displaced Persons in post-war Germany, 1945-1947’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2016), pp. 606-634.
- Introduction ‘Beyond de Gaulle and Beyond London: The French External Resistance and its international networks’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, co-written with Dr Charlotte Faucher, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2018), pp. 195-221.
- ‘Not by bread alone? UNRRA relief workers and the ‘rehabilitation’ of European Displaced Persons in Gutach, 1945-1947’ in Ludivine Broch and Alison Carrol (eds) France in an Era of Global War, 1914-45: Occupation, Politics and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 210-230.
- ‘When most relief workers had never heard of Freud. UNRRA in the French occupation zone, 1945-1947’, in Sandra Barkhof and Angela K. Smith (eds) War and Displacement in the Twentieth Century: Global conflicts (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 199-223.
- Outcast Europe. Refugees and Relief workers in an Era of Total War, 1936-1948. (London: Continuum, 2011), with Prof. Sharif Gemie, Dr Fiona Reid and Louise Ingram.
- ‘Writing History in the Aftermath of ‘Relief’: Some comments on Relief in the Aftermath of War, with Sharif Gemie, Journal of Contemporary History, 44, 2 (2009), pp. 309-318.
Ewa’s research interests are mainly focused on the twentieth-century history of central and eastern Europe and deal broadly with state-sponsored history, remembrance of war, decommunisation of public space, population displacement, borderlands and ethnic minorities. She is a member of Memory Studies Association and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester.
Works
- ‘When and why is the forgotten past recovered? The Battle of Warsaw,1920 and the role of local actors in the production of memory’, Memory Studies, vol. 13, no. 2,2020, pp. 176–190.
- ‘Why is Poland Unable to Celebrate Victories? ‘The Miracle on Vistula’, a Century Later’, The Polish Review (New York), vol. 64, no 2, 2019, pp. 104-120.
- ‘Spaces of Nationhood and Contested War Monuments in Poland: The Warsaw Monument to the Brotherhood in Arms’, in The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History After 1945, eds. by Berber Bevernage and Nico Wouters (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2018), pp. 477-493.
- ‘Krajobrazy Pamieci Polskiego Miasta: Spory wokól Pomników Armii Czerwonej w Polsce’, in Pod Czerwona Gwiazda: Aspekty Sowieckiej Obecnosci w Europie Srodkowowschodniej w 1945, ed. by Sebastian Rosenbaum and Dariusz Wegrzyn (Warszawa and Katowice: IPN, 2017), pp. 14-25.
- ‘The Search for Legitimacy in Post-Martial Law Poland: The Case of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah’, in Cinema in the Cold War: Political Projections, ed. by Cyril Buffet (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 114-140.
- ‘Memory of War and Cosmopolitan Solidarity’, in Whose Cosmopolitanism? Critical Cosmopolitanism, Relationalities and Discontents, ed. by Andre Irving and Nina Glick Schiller (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014), pp. 218-231.
- Post-communist Poland - Contested Pasts and Future Identities (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).
Peter teaches modern history at the University of Manchester, where he is also affiliated with the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (elected 2019) and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (elected 2011).
Works
- The Unsettling of Europe: the Great Migration, 1945 to the Present (Penguin, Basic, 2019) - Winner of Nanovic Institute's Laura Shannon Prize for "the best book published in 2018/19.
- The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford University Press, 2013).
- Europe on the Move: Refugees in the Era of the Great War (Manchester University Press, 2017).
- Free World? The Campaign to Save the World's Refugees, 1956-1963 (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
- A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War 1 (Indiana University Press, 1999). Winner of the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize (2000); Alec Nove Prize (2001).
Peter has also directed several research projects on population displacement, state-building and social identity in the aftermath of the two world wars.
- AHRC project (2018-2021) “Reckoning with refugeedom: refugee voices in modern history, 1919 to 1975”.
Penny is Professor Emerita in Modern History at the University of Manchester. She is a Fellow of the British Academy (elected 2020) and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (elected 2011). She is on the editorial boards of the Journal of War and Culture Studies and Social and Cultural History.
Her research interests focus particularly on gender and war and on oral history and other types of personal testimony in relation to the experience of war.
Works
- Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice, London: Routledge, 2019, pp. viii, 193.
- Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in Britain in the Second World War, Manchester University Press, 2007, pp. xviii, 307 (co-authored with C. M. Peniston-Bird).
- Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: discourse and subjectivity in oral histories of the Second World War Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. xiii, 338.
- Women Workers in the Second World War: Production and Patriarchy in Conflict, Routledge Library Editions: Women’s History, vol. 36, London: Routledge, (3rd edition) 2013. (1st edition 1984, 2nd edition 1989).
- Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars, Routledge Library Editions: Women’s History, vol. 5, London: Routledge, 2013 (2nd edition) (1st edition 1986) (co-authored with Gail Braybon).
