Professor Robert Gildea FBA

Teaching

I was a Tutorial Fellow at Merton between 1979 and 2006, teaching alongside Philip Waller and Roger Highfield (until 1989) and Steve Gunn (after 1989).

I taught General History (now European and World History) from 1715 to 1973, together with Political Thought and historical methods papers Approaches to History and Disciplines of History.

I have fond memories of the reading parties we organised for History Finalists at Treharrock House, near Port Isaac, Cornwall.

In 2006 I moved to Worcester College as Professor of Modern History,  and helped to develop new papers on The Global Twentieth Century and Contesting Masculinity, 200 to 2000.

I retired in 2020.

Research

My research is on France and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, moving more recently into aspects of British history.

On France, I have worked on resistance, revolt and revolution and on education and the German occupation of 1940-45 in la France profonde, provincial France.

I developed a research interest in collective memory in the 1980s and in oral history in the 1990s and 2000s.

I have directed three collaborative research projects, on daily life in Europe under Nazi and Fascist occupation, on Europe’s 1968, and on transnational resistance between 1936 and 1948.

My most recent publications are Backbone of the Nation: mining communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 (2023) and What is History For?  (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2024)