Professor Robert Gildea
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)
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.
What is History For? (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2024)
Backbone of the Nation. Mining commuinities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 (New Haven and London: Yale, 2023).
Fighters across Frontiers: Transnational Resistance in Europe, 1936-1948, edited with Ismee Tames (Manchester University Press, 2020)
Empires of the Mind: the Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present (Cambridge, CUP, 2019). Translated as L’Esprit imperial. Passé colonial et politiques contemporaines (Paris, Passés Composés, Feb. 2020)
‘Laïcité, Republic and Nation in Post-Colonial France’, Contemporary European History 27/1 (Mar. 2018), 136-48
‘Les Inconnus de la Resistance: letters to L’Humanité, 1984’, in Essays in French Literature & Culture, no. 54, ‘Hidden words, hidden worlds: everyday life and narrative sources’ (France, 1939-1945) (2017), 117-40.
‘Lettres de correspondants français à la BBC (1940-1943) : une pénombre de la résistance ?, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 125, Jan.- Mar. 2015, 61-76
Fighters in the Shadows: a new history of the French Resistance (Faber & Faber, 2015; Harvard UP, 2015). Longlisted for the 2015 Samuel Johnson prize.
Translated as Comment sont-ils devenus résistants? Une nouvelle histoire de la Résistance, 1940-1945 (Paris, Les Arènes, 2017). Winner of the Philippe Viannay Défense de la France Prize 2017, awarded by the Fondation de la Résistance.
Europe’s 1968. Voices of Revolt, edited with James Mark and Anette Warring (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013)
‘The Long March of Oral History: Around 1968 in France’, Oral History 38/1 (Spring 2010), 68-80. Inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History, 7 Nov. 2008
Children of the Revolution. The French, 1799-1914 (London, Allen Lane and Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2008).
Writing Contemporary History, edited with Anne Simonin (London, Hodder Arnold,, 2008).
Surviving Hitler and Mussolini, edited with Oliver Wieviorka and Anette Warring (Oxford and New York, Berg, 2006).
Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation (London, Macmillan, 2002). Winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2003.
Published in the USA with the subtitle Daily Life in the Heartland of France under by German Occupation by Metropolitan/Henry Holt (2003)
‘Resistance, reprisals and community in occupied France, 1941-1944', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 3 (2003), 163-85.
‘Les Années noires? Clandestine dancing in Occupied France’, in Martyn Cornick and Ceri Crossley eds., Problems in French History (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000), 197-212
France since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 1996; Opus paperback, 1997. Second edition 2002). Awarded the Enid McLeod Prize of the Franco-British Society, 1996.
The Past in French History (Yale University Press, 1994; paperback edition, 1996)
The Third Republic from 1870 to 1914 (Longman, 1988; second edition published as France, 1870-1914, 1996)
Barricades and Borders: Europe, 1800-1914 (Oxford University Press, Short Oxford History of the Modern World, 1987; second edition, 1996; third edition 2003)
Education in Provincial France, 1800-1914. A Study of three departments (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983)
