Expertise:

French History, British History, Pacifism, britain france paris london welsh uk england wales

Language(s) spoken:

English

Professional associations:

MA, PhD, FRHistS

I took my B.A. Hons. in History and French at the University of Alberta in 1981.  My interests in history were initially primarily British and German; I wrote my honours thesis on “The German-Russian Trade Treaty of 1894”, using a wide selection of published German diplomatic documents, and sat three comprehensive examination papers in modern British history (1485-1960) in my final year. 

The following year I took my M.A. at the University of Toronto, writing a research essay entitled “Romain Rolland, Interwar Pacifism, and the Problem of Peace.”  A few years later, this became my first major publication, albeit greatly reduced in size to a chapter in a book published in the United States.

The year at Toronto was pivotal in other ways for my future development as an historian.  Not only did my interests in history and French literature come together, but my approach to history changed completely.  Whereas until this point my interests had lain in fairly traditional diplomatic history, now they were focused on the history of the margins, and specifically on the nature of pacifism in interwar France.  I was intrigued by the complete dearth of studies on French pacifism.  Perhaps the French really were different.  My M.A. seemed to indicate that they were not. 

This preliminary impression was more than confirmed the following year when I began my Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh as a Commonwealth Scholar in Modern European History under the supervision of Professor Maurice Larkin.  An initial four-month research trip to Paris in my first year at Edinburgh demonstrated the existence of a huge variety of sources on French pacifism which had never been used by historians.  I had stumbled, almost by accident, on the perfect Ph.D. topic, one that was quite literally virgin territory.  I returned to Paris for two full years of research, and then began the writing up process.  Within four months of my Ph.D. viva in February 1988, my Ph.D. thesis had been accepted for publication by the Clarendon Press, the academic imprint of Oxford University Press. 

I came back to Canada to take up a Killam Post-Doctoral Fellowship and subsequently a Canada Research Fellowship at the University of Alberta from 1988 until 1992, at which point I was appointed to the History Department at Concordia. I served as Graduate Programme Director in the department from 1999-2002, and was an Adjunct Professor of History at McGill from 2000-2010.  From 2000-2003 I was a member of the editorial board of French Historical Studies. In 2010 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in the United Kingdom.  I have been a Visiting Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and at the University of St Andrews.  

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