Past in the Present Research Group

Dr Amanda Lanzillo I am an historian of South Asia, researching labour, technology, and social change within South Asian Muslim communities. My forthcoming first book is titled Pious Labour: Islam, artisanship, and technology in colonial India. It analyzes colonial-era social, economic, and technological change in north India through the perspectives of Muslim workers and artisan labourers. Prior to joining Brunel, I held a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Princeton University Society of Fellows, where I also taught in the Department of History. I hold a PhD in History from Indiana University. My work has been supported by grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Fulbright Hays Program, the American Historical Association, the Library of Congress, and other funders.

Dr Fabio Simonetti I am an historian specialising in Italian and European Modern History, transnational and gendered encounters in conflict zones, occupation studies, and Second World War Anglo-Italian relations. I joined Brunel University London after completing my PhD in Italian Studies at the University of Reading, where I also taught Italian and European History modules from 2019 to 2022. My PhD project, entitled ‘Encounters in Wartime Italy: British Soldiers and Italian Civilians, 1943-1944’, was an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) in collaboration with the Imperial War Museums (IWM). My interdisciplinary project aimed at reframing the social relationship between occupiers and occupied in Allied-occupied Italy by exploring war as a means of human interconnection. I am particularly interested in understanding how war and occupation affect people’s lives and how societies respond to them by exploring wartime encounters between soldiers and civilians through the prism of autobiographical sources, material culture, and artistic representations in connection with official documentation. My first monograph - Via Tasso. Quartier generale e carcere tedesco durante l’occupazione di Roma (2016) - explored the history and memory of Via Tasso, the Gestapo/SD HQ and prison in Nazi-occupied Rome. I have also published articles on the British soldiers' perception of their encounter with locals in Sicily, the material culture of the Allied occupation of Italy, and the construction of a stereotyped image of the ‘enemy’ in Britain and Italy in the 1940s. I am currently writing my first monograph in English language. The book will explore the encounter between British soldiers and Italian civilians during the Second World War Allied occupation of Italy. Selected Publications Monograph 2016: Simonetti, F., Via Tasso. Quartier generale e carcere tedesco durante l’occupazione di Roma (Rome: Odradek) (332 pages). ISBN: 9788896487556. Articles in peer-reviewed journals and volumes 2022: Simonetti, F., ‘Invasion, Liberation and Occupation: British Soldiers’ Wartime Encounters in Sicily’, in One Hundred Years of Army Historical Research, ed. by A. Bamford (Warwick: Helion & Company, 2022), pp. 271-296; 2020: Simonetti, F., ‘Researching Testimonial Objects: The Postmemory of the Allied Occupation of Italy through the Imperial War Museum’s Collections’, Status Quaestionis. Language, Text, Culture, 18, 171-188. ISSN: 2239-1983; 2020: Simonetti, F., ‘Shaping Each Other: British and Italian Depictions of the Enemy (1935-1943)’, in Fascism and Anti-fascism in Great Britain, ed. by T. Colacicco (Pisa: Pacini), pp. 221-241. ISBN: 978-88-6995-699-7. Other articles 2020: Simonetti, F., ‘The Landings in Sicily: Soldiers’ and Civilians’ Perception of a Wartime Encounter’, in Wars in History. Historical Documents and Actual Problems of Archaeography, Archivistics, Source Studies, Russian and World History of Modern and Recent Times (Moscow: Political Encyclopaedia Publisher), pp. 380-385; 2016: Simonetti, F., 'From the Alps to the American Air Museum: Pont-Saint-Martin and the Memory of the Bombing Raid of 23 August 1944', IWM Despatches, 23, 26-29. ISBN: 978-19-0489-747-7. Edited volumes 2015: Simonetti, F. and Ricciardi, C. (eds.), Il ragazzo con i baffi. Lettere dalla Russia (Rome: IlMioLibro) (107 pages). ISBN: 9788891097477. Twentieth-century Italian and European History Social history of war and occupation Soldier-civilian and gender encounters in war zones Oral history and autobiographical sources Modules taught at Brunel Europe at War, 1914-1945 Europe in a Global Context European Union Politics: Problems and Prospects Conflict and Diplomacy in the Modern World Global London Introduction to World Politics War and Geography

Dr Iain Farquharson My research interests focus on military history in the first half of the Twentieth Century. My current work focuses on the development and change of education and training within the British and Imperial armies, primarily through the study of officer education at cadet colleges and staff colleges. In addition I am undertaking research into the application of multi-disciplinary (primarily Sociological) theories of culture and institutional innovation to the study of military culture and how militaries respond to and assimilate reforms to fundimental aspects of their cultural norms. Military History, Security Studies, Military Education and Training, Military Culture, Institutional Cultural Change, Imperial and Commonwealth History

Dr Richard Hammond I am a Senior Lecturer in the History and Politics Division. Prior to this I held positions at King's College London and the Universities of Portsmouth and Exeter. I received my PhD from the University of Exeter in 2012, which focused on the conduct and impact of the Allied anti-shipping campaign in the Mediterranean during the Second World War. My first monograph, Strangling the Axis: The Fight for Control of the Mediterranean during the Second World War, is based on a significant expansion of my doctoral research and was published with Cambridge University Press in 2020. I have published numerous articles in journals including War in History (2018), The International History Review (2017), the Journal of Military History (2016), the Journal of Strategic Studies (2013) and Air Power Review (2013). Two of these have been awarded prestigious prizes: the Corbett Prize in Modern Naval History (Proxime Accessit) by the Institute for Historical Research and a Moncado Prize by the Society for Military History. I am also a Vice President of the Second World War Research Group (swwresearch.com) and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Modern British and European History Modern Mediterranean History The History of Warfare (especially 1914-45) Anglo-Italian Relations during the period of Italian fascism Inter and Intra-Service rivalry in the British Armed Forces Historians and their Craft (Level 5) From Gibraltar to Suez: Britain and the Mediterranean, 1704-1956 (Level 5) Fascist Italy, 1919-1945: Revolution, Conflict and Collapse (Level 6) The Second World War (Level 7) The Royal Navy in the Twentieth Century (Level 7)

Professor Matthew Hughes Matthew Hughes studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies and at the London School of Economics. He completed his ESRC-funded PhD in 1995 under the supervision of Professors Brian Bond and Brian Holden Reid in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London on the strategy surrounding the British campaign in Palestine in the First World War. After working as an intern with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Professor Hughes lectured at the universities of Northampton and Salford before coming to Brunel University in 2005, where he was Head of Politics and History, 2012-15. Professor Hughes has been a British Academy funded visiting fellow at the American University in Cairo, the American University in Beirut, and at Tel Aviv University. He spent two years as the Marine Corps University Foundation-funded Maj-Gen Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair in Military Theory at the US Marine Corps University, Quantico, 2008-10. His latest monograph on British counter-insurgency in Palestine in the 1930s entitled Britain's Pacification of Palestine: the British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936-1939 (2019, paperback edition 2020) published with Cambridge University Press was a 'commended' finalist for the 2019 Society for Army Historical Research Templer Medal Prize, was long listed for the British Army Military Book of the Year 2020, and has been translated into Arabic by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies. He was the editor of the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research (2004-8); he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a former Councillor and then Chair of Council of the Army Records Society (2014-18); he is a judge for the Society for Army Historical Research's annual Templer Medal prize (2003-4, 2007-8, 2018-); he is a JP and a Trustee of the Gurkha Centre; and he sits or has sat on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Military History, International History Review, Open Military History, Journal of Maltese History and Middle Eastern Studies, and was a judge for the last's annual Elie Kedourie Prize. He has been an external examiner at Maynooth University Ireland (for the Irish Defence Forces at Currgah Camp), Swansea, Strathcylde, the Joint Services Command and Staff College, King's College London, Sussex, Kent, Buckingham, Northampton, Cambridge and Wolverhampton; he was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Buckingham, 2016-20; and he is currently an external examiner at Loughborough University and the University of Salford. He has supervised nine PhD students to completion, and welcomes new research students interested in military history subjects. Qualifications: BA Geography and History (SOAS) 1988 MSc (Econ) International Relations (LSE) 1989 PGCE History (Cardiff) 1991 PhD War Studies (King's College London) 1995 Matthew Hughes is interested in war and history broadly understood, and after finishing his funded-project examining British methods of colonial pacification and counter-insurgency, with particular reference to Palestine in the British Mandate period, he is now examining British operations in Borneo during Confrontation, with funding from the A.V.B. Norman Trust and a Moody Research Grant from the LBJ Presidential Library, Austin, Texas. Military history War studies The British Army Mandate Palestine Counter-insurgency Undergraduate Programmes Module convenor PX1608 Total War in the Modern Era PX1607 Makers of Modern Strategy PP5572 War in History Administration Deputy Divisional Lead Subject Library Officer

Professor Kenneth Morgan I am primarily an economic and social historian of the British Atlantic world in the ‘long’ eighteenth century (1688 - 1840). My particular academic specialism is the history of merchants, ships, foreign trade and ports. I also have subsidiary academic interests in Australian history and in music history. I have previously taught in schools, colleges and other universities before coming to Brunel. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Qualifications: BA 1st class honours, Combined Arts, University of Leicester DPhil Modern History, New College, Oxford PGCE History and English, King’s College, Cambridge My research and publication interests include the following: the dimensions of the British slave trade in space and through time; the organisation of the slave trade; slave work conditions on plantations; slavery, the slave trade and abolitionism; maritime exploration in the 18th and 19th centuries in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; Australian music history; the history of conductors and orchestras; the editing of historical texts. Slavery and the slave trade Maritime history Australian history Caribbean history Undergraduate Programmes Module convenor Migration and the Settler World, 1600-1914 (Yr 1) Australia and the Modern World, 1788-2000 (Yr 2)The British Maritime World, 1660-1815 (Yr 3) Administration Exam Coordinator

Dr Benedetta Morsiani Benedetta is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow at Brunel University London, with a research project exploring the performance of Black beauty among Black British women since 1948. She previously worked as an Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology at Northeastern University London, and before that completed a PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. Benedetta's research focuses on understanding the experiences, perspectives, and contributions of individuals belonging to Black African minorities in Europe. Her work, particularly, investigates socio-cultural issues through the study of material culture and forms of symbolic representations, and their intersection with political and economic spheres. Her Leverhulme research project, entitled 'Black beauty in Britain since 1948: self-assertion and collective power', investigates the cultural, political, and economic significance of beauty practices employed by Black British women since 1948. In particular, the research uncovers how Black British women have used beauty practices to challenge normative assumptions about beauty, establish self-agency, convey subversive political messages, and create entrepreneurship opportunities. In so doing, the research transforms the existing scholarship on the history of beauty, which is hitherto a white history, and foregrounds the leading role of Black beauty entrepreneurs in both activism and defining what beauty is. Benedetta's current research both establishes and extends her doctoral research where she investigated the migratory experiences of young London Congolese (DRC). The project traced how young London Congolese employed body performances to portray their cultural heritage and embody their racial, ethnic, gender and transnational identities. Fashion and beauty practices offered a powerful portrayal of their life histories, socio-cultural memories, everyday life experiences and issues affecting Black African diasporas in London. The project revealed the sphere of entanglement between identity issues, cultural and aesthetic rituals of the body, politics, and economics. The History and Politics of Beauty. The Anthropology of the Body. Racial and Gender Politics. Cultural Heritage in Diasporic Contexts. Migration, Transnationalism and Material Culture. Module convenor: 'Peoples and Cultures: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology', Northeastern University London. 'Global Markets, Local Cultures', Northeastern University London. Module contributor: ‘People and Things on the Move: Identity, Place and Memory In and Across Diasporic Spaces’, University of Westminster.

Dr Niall Palmer I studied for my BA in Politics at Swansea University and graduated in 1984. I then undertook my PhD at Bristol University, where I researched the political nature and electoral impact of the New Hampshire presidential primary. I was employed for two years (1989-91) on a Teaching and Research Fellowship with Bristol University’s Politics department before joining the American Studies department of the West London Institute from 1991-99. From 1999 to 2006, I taught on the American Studies programme at Brunel University, after which I became a member of the Department of Politics and History, teaching United States government, politics and political history. Qualifications: BA Swansea (1984) PhD Bristol (1989) My research interests centre primarily upon American political history, though my research, writing and media commentary also includes modern US politics and political issues. I have published historical studies of the Harding and Coolidge administrations and of US politics and society in the 1920s. Latest research analyses expansion and change in the powers and scope of executive authority during the early 1920s. I have also published work on (and contributed to radio commentaries on) contemporary US political and electoral issues and events. US presidency US elections US party politics & ideology US political history Undergraduate Programmes Module convenor Introduction to American Politics (Lev 4) Issues in American Politics (Lev 5) Media, Politics and Power in the US (Lev 6)

Professor Matthew Seligmann I Joined Brunel as a Reader in 2012 and became a professor in 2015. I am a specialist on intelligence, threat assessment, security, armaments races and the the origins of modern wars. My main focus is on how the the British government responded to the German challenge in the first decades of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the naval competition between the two countries. I have published widely on these topics, including authoring or co-authoring over ten books, many book chapters and numerous articles and reviews. My teaching tends to focus on questions of intelligence, security and conflict, but I am also interested in how we (individually and as societies) fashion a past useful for the purposes of the present. My current research focuses on the Royal Navy during the era of the Anglo-German antagonism. As a result, I write books and articles that are mostly about British naval policy, armaments races, espionage, battleship building and naval strategy. One of these articles, a study of the origins and creation of the Home Fleet in 1902, won the Julian Corbett Prize, the UK’s principal award for excellence in Naval History. Armaments races, especially the Anglo-German naval race. The origins of modern wars, especially the First World War. Military and Naval Intelligence and threat assessment. Module convenor PX1611 The Problem of the Past (Yr 1) PX2604 First World War (Yr 2) PP3620 The Royal Navy in the Era of the Great Naval Races (Yr 3) Administration Director of Internationalisation, SPS. Academic Exchanges Coordinator, Politics and History.

Professor Peter Thomas Professor Peter D. Thomas is an historian of political thought, an historian of philosophy and a political theorist. He has studied and worked at the University of Queensland, Freie Universität Berlin, L’Università “Federico II”, Naples, the University of Amsterdam and the University of Vienna. He has been a member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a research fellow at the University of Helsinki, and the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, and a recipient of Australian, British, German, Italian and Dutch research fellowships. Qualifications: Fellow of the Higher Education Academy PhD (Amsterdam) MA (Research) BA (Hons) (UQ) BA (UQ) Professor Thomas is an historian of political thought, an historian of philosophy and a political theorist. As an historian of political thought, his major contributions have been in the history of Italian political thought in the early twentieth century, particularly the thought of Antonio Gramsci. He has also co-edited volumes on Karl Marx’s political-economic thought in historical context, and on the development of the thought of Louis Althusser. As an historian of philosophy, he has published on the history of German philosophy in the mid nineteenth century and Italian philosophy in the twentieth century, the history of Marxist philosophy, philosophies of history and theories of plural temporality. As a political theorist, his work has focused on concepts of political organization, forms of socio-political transformation, and theories of subalternity, inclusion/exclusion and citizenship. He is currently working on a study of central themes in contemporary radical political thought, including notions of the nature of politics and processes of politicization, the relationship between politics and the political, and the concept of the political subject. He is also working on a collection of documents and critical essays related to Gramsci’s time in Russia (with Professor Craig Brandist of the University of Sheffield, funded by a British Academy grant). In addition to his own research, he has also translated the work of Roberto Finelli, Antonio Negri and Massimiliano Tomba, among others. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, and co-editor of the Historical Materialism Book Series. History of political thought History of philosophy Italian political philosophy Marxist philosophy and theory Contemporary political theory Undergraduate Programmes Module convenor The State and Revolution (Yr 2) Crisis and Critique (Yr 3) Module contributor Central Themes in Political Thought (Yr 1) Postgraduate Programmes Module convenor Revolution and Counter-revolution in Twentieth Century Political Thought Administration Co-director of the Brunel Social and Political Thought Research Centre

Dr Steven Wagner I am an historian of intelligence, security, empire and the modern Middle East. Before coming to Brunel, I was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University, Montreal. I received my DPhil from the University of Oxford, and my BA and MA from the University of Calgary. Since 2007, I have been looking at records declassified records in the UK, USA, and Israel which shed new light on the story of the Palestine Mandate, but also on the previously unknown role of intelligence in countering terrorism & insurgency, and in shaping British policy. Qualifications: DPhil – University of Oxford MA – University of Calgary BA – University of Calgary Broadly speaking, my research covers the relationship between intelligence, state and society, and how intelligence services influenced the emergence of the Modern Middle East. Since 2007, I have studied declassified records in the UK, USA, and Israel which shed new light on the story of the Palestine Mandate, but also on the previously unknown role of intelligence in countering terrorism & insurgency, and in shaping British policy. Specifically, he has focused on how intelligence shaped Britain's thirty year rule in Palestine, and its impact upon the Arab-Zionist conflict. intelligence and security british empire the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict strategy & policy

Dr Hannah Whittaker I am an historian of modern Africa. My research is mainly focused on issues relating to colonialism, borders, development and conflict. particularly in eastern Africa. Before joining Politics and History at Brunel in September 2013, I taught History at SOAS. I completed my PhD in African History at SOAS in 2011. My research explores issues relating to colonialism, development, borders and conflict in twentieth century Africa. I am curently working on two research projects. The first is a long-term history of frontier development in Africa. Taking the northern Kenyan borderland as a case study, the research details the connections between development, violence and state-building across the colonial and postcolonial periods. This research has received funding from the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust. The second project concerns public representations of empire in Britain, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. The project explores the ways that empire has been remembered, articulated and forgotten in public monuments across Britain and Africa. African history Kenya and Somalia Colonialism and decolonization Development Borders and frontiers Undergraduate Programmes Module convenor Africa and the World (Yr 1) Colonialism and Decolonization in Africa (Yr 2) Violence and Conflict in Eastern Africa (Yr 3)

Dr Monica Fernandes I am a scholar specialising in modern African history and transnational women's activism. I have a BA in Psychology from the Rand Afrikaans University, BA Honours degrees in History and Political Science from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, a MA degree in International Conflict Analysis from Kent University, and a PhD from Brunel University London. I am also a Senior Fellow of Advance HE, and my research interests include transnational women’s activism, African history, and gender and race in South Africa. I’m interested in the mobility and organisation of the women’s movement in South Africa, and how this theme fits within other social frameworks such as race and class. My research interests also include how the South Africa’s women’s movement corresponds with the international women’s movement. My PhD focused on two of South Africa’s biggest and most influential women’s organisations in the 1950s: the Federation of South African Women and the Black Sash. My research explored how South African women organised themselves as political actors in a time where apartheid dictated social and political movements, and the overall impact these organisations made. This study contributed to further understanding women’s roles in society during apartheid, contributing directly to both South African and transnational historiography. African history Gender and Race in South Africa Transnational history Women's activism Module convenor: History of the Women’s Movement in the West (Level 5) The Long Walk to Freedom: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (Level 6) Level 6 Dissertation Supervisor Undergraduate Dissertation Convenor for Politics and History

Dr Inge Dornan My research and teaching focus on histories of race and gender in Britain and the Americas. I joined Brunel University London in 2003, after completing my PhD at Cambridge University. I am currently Division Lead of Politics and History, and Deputy Head of the Department of Social and Political Sciences. In this role, I am committed to providing an outstanding student experience, based on excellent teaching and a strong community of care and support for our students. I have a longstanding record of commitment to generating research impact and sharing and disseminating historical research in the public sphere. In 2019, I led a series of public engagement events in London on the theme of 'Unlocking the Secrets of Britain's Slave Past' as part of the UK Being Human Festival of the Humanities, sponsored by the London School of Advanced Study, the AHRC and British Academy. This included walking tours to uncover the hidden narratives of British slavery in the built landscape of Hillingdon and Uxbridge; a specially curated exhibition with Brunel University London Archives on the British and Foreign School Society and the education of enslaved children in the British Caribbean; and an award-winning heritage production on the British slave trade, Breaking the Silence, which I co-wrote with theatre director and academic, Dr Holly Maples. These events culminated in a public lecture on the forgotten history of British slavery which I chaired with Professor David Olusoga. In 2020, I was awarded Brunel University London's inaugural Research Impact Award for Public Engagement. In 2021, Breaking the Silence attracted considerable critical acclaim on a sell-out tour of the UK. A second tour is scheduled in 2023 to commemorate the bicententary of the founding of the British Anti-Slavery Society. My research has also been supported through several fellowships, including Senior Fellow and Associate Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford, where I conducted a research project on enslaved women in the British slave trade; and Visiting Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford, where I developed a research project on the education of enslaved children in the British West Indies. I am committed to research-led teaching and have been grateful to be nominated by my students for the Student Led Teaching Awards for best Tutor and Dissertation Supervisor. I support and advocate for the study of History in the UK, through my membership of the History UK Steering Committee, and serving on the 2021 UK QAA History Subject Benchmark Statement panel. My research explores race and gender in Britain and the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a particular emphasis on the British slave trade, slavery and abolition. I'm currently undertaking a research project on the global role and impact of the British and Foreign School Society based on the newly catalogued archive of the BFSS's foreign correspondence collection. The BFSS was the UK's foremost non-denominational educational society in the nineteenth century. Led by pioneering social reformers as well as a number of leading abolitionists, including William Wilberforce, the society set its sights on engineering a worldwide reformation in elementary education over the course of the nineteenth century, and dispatched scores of trained missionaries and teachers to all four corners of the globe to deliver unsectarian Christian instruction to pupils in the English language and vernacular. From 1814, the society sent trained missionaries and teachers to the British West Indies, where they taught enslaved children to read and write. I have a second monograph project nearing completion on a history of women's slave ownership in South Carolina c.1690-1865. I'm also working on a third, long-term research project on a history of women walkers. Inspired by a life-long passion for walking and the outdoors, this book draws on many years of research and teaching in the field of British women's history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. British slavery and slave trading in North America and the Caribbean c1700-1833 Gender and slavery Child slavery Slave literacy and education British and American abolition Undergraduate Programmes Module convenor Race and Gender in Britain and America c1700-1960 Slavery and Abolition in the Atlantic World History of the Women's Movement, 1790-1930 Level 4 History Tutor Level 6 Dissertation Supervisor University of Iowa summer school programme lecturer on Diversity in American Gender Studies Administration Teaching Enhancement Framework analyst and author History Subject Division and Politics Subject Division Deputy Senior Tutor Politics and History Undergraduate Programmes Member University Senate University Programme Developer & Chair

Dr Martin Folly I studied for my PhD under Donald Cameron Watt and Antony Best at the London School of Economics, and then worked as a research assistant on a project ‘Western Defence and the Origins and Evolution of NATO, 1947 - 1953’ at the West London Institute of Higher Education under Geoffrey Matthews. I then became lecturer in American Studies at WLIHE, and director of Studies for American Studies at Brunel. I am now Reader in International History. I am a committee member of the British International Historians Group of the British International Studies Association (BISA), and a member of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). I have also had a long and varied career as an amateur actor and guileful off-spinner. Qualifications: BA (Hons) History, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge MA Cambridge University PhD International History, London School of Economics, University of London Fellow of the Royal Historical Society My work centres on the perceptions and attitudes that shaped relations between the United States, Soviet Union and Great Britain during and immediately after the Second World War. I am particularly interested in the role that individuals have played in the shaping of foreign policy. For the wartime period my work is now focusing the process of cooperation and active management of inter-coalition tensions. I am also exploring the impact of Axis diplomacy on the maintenance and integrity of the Grand Alliance. For the post-war period it addresses the implications of Britain’s defence dilemmas on the genesis of the Cold War. The Grand alliance in the Second World War Diplomacy and foreign policy during the Second World War and early Cold War The early history of NATO United States foreign policy 1914 - 1976 Undergraduate Programmes Module convenor United States Foreign Policy from World War II to the End of the Cold War (FHEQ Level 5) Historians and their Craft (FHEQ Level 5) The African American Struggle for Civil Rights, 1941-1992 (FHEQ Level 5: in preparation) The Second World War (FHEQ Level 6) The Creation of the Western Alliance, 1945-55 (FHEQ Level 6) Administration Deputy Division Lead, Politics and History Vice-Chancellor's Representative (Academic)

Dr Alison Carrol I am a historian of Modern Europe, and I am interested in the history of borders, borderlands, nationhood, and what it means to belong in modern Europe. Before joining Brunel in 2011 I was Junior Research Fellow at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge (2008-2010) and Lecturer in Modern History at Birkbeck, University of London (2010-2011). In 2010 I was awarded the Etienne Baluze Prize in European Regional History. I have been a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for European Global Studies, University of Basel, and in 2023-4 I am a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History, University of Ljubljana and a Fellow of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a member of the Committee of the Society for the Study of French History, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Convenor of the IHR's Modern French History Seminar, and a member of the AHRC Peer Review College. My current research focuses on the long history of the Channel tunnel, and was inspired by the question of where our ideas about borders come from. The starting point of this project is that while borders represent powerful symbols of national identity and historical continuity, they have been imagined and reimagined in a variety of ways, and have functioned differently across time periods and political regimes. I use a case study of the Channel Tunnel to think about what proposals for (and opposition to) a tunnel tell us about shifting ideas about borders, connection and cohesion in France and Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This research has been funded by a Brunel University London Athena Swan award, by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust and by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. The first article based on this research is available to read now in The Historical Journal. The Gerda Henkel Stiftung funded and produced a series of short documentaries on the project, which is available to view here. My work on the Channel tunnel was inspired by research on the border region of Alsace in the twentieth century. My book, The Return of Alsace to France, 1918-1939, asks what happened when the region of Alsace returned to France after almost fifty years of annexation into the German Empire: How did France attempt to make this German-speaking region French? How did the Alsatian popoulation see themselves? What did return mean for the region? I argue that return was not completed when French troops entered the region in 1918, or indeed when return was ratified by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Rather I view return as a process that evolved over the following two decades, and involved a range of actors inside and outside Alsace. In order to investigate the meaning of return, I treated the border as a category of analysis, and analysed the ways in which return was shaped and driven by the national boundary between France and Germany, which lies along the east of Alsace. This book was shortlisted for the European Book Prize (awarded by the Council for European Studies) and I have published a number of articles and chapters on Alsace, most recently in French History, Contemporary European History, and The Conversation. I am also interested in the relationship between borders, ideas of belonging and heritage. I will be developing this theme with my colleague Professor Astrid Swenson (University of Bayreuth), through a project entitled 'Borders of Belonging. Historical and Creative Methdos in Heritage and Placemaking.' This has been funded by the Humboldt Centre (Bayreuth), and Brunel's Institute of Communities and Society. My teaching at Brunel reflects my research, and I have taught a wide variety of optional and compulsory modules on European history and the history of borders, as well as modules on historical methods. I have been honoured to be nominated by my students for prizes at the Student-Led Teaching Awards including Inspirational Lecturer of the Year, Supervisor of the Year and Feedback of the Year, and to have been shortlisted for Feedback of the Year. Qualifications: PhD in History MA in European History BA (Hons) in History with European Study Modern European History Modern French history Borders and borderlands Nations and nation-building Alsace Regional history and minority nationalisms