Prof Mark Hewitson

Research summary

I am currently working on the following projects:

1) The Violence of War

Published works include Absolute War: Violence and Mass Warfare in the German Lands, 1792-1820 (OUP, 2017), The People's Wars: Histories of Violence in the German Lands, 1820-1888 (OUP, 2017), Combatants, Civilians and Cultures of Violence (a special issue of History, 2016), Making Sense of Military Violence (a special issue of Cultural History, 2017, co-edited with Matthew D'Auria), and Making Sense of Violence: Intellectuals, Writers and Modern Warfare (a co-edited special issue of the European Review of History, 2018).

2) Birth of a Nation: Germany, 1848-1888

I have published one volume of this project to date: Nationalism in Germany, 1848-1866: Revolutionary Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 'The Old Forms are Breaking Up, ... Our New Germany is Rebuilding Itself': Constitutionalism, Nationalism and the Creation of a German Polity during the Revolutions of 1848-49' came out in the English Historical Review in 2010.

3) Nationalism, Globalization and Europeanism

Publications include Germany and the Modern World, 1880-1914 (CUP, 2018), Europe and the East: Historical Ideas of Eastern and Southeast Europe, 1789-1989 (Routledge, 2023), co-edited with Jan Vermeiren, Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917-1957 (Berghahn, 2012), co-edited with Matthew D'Auria, and What is a Nation? Europe, 1789-1914 (OUP, 2006), co-edited with Timothy Baycroft. 

4) International Relations and the Outbreak of the First World War

Publications: Germany and the Causes of the First World War (Bloomsbury, 2004) and 'Germany and France before the First World War: A Reassessment of Wilhelmine Foreign Policy', English Historical Review, 115 (2000).

5) Historical Theory

Publications: History and Causality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and, with E. Akyeampong, C. Arni, P. K. Crossley and W. H. Sewell, 'Explaining Historical Change; or, The Lost History of Causes', American Historical Review, 120 (2015).

Teaching summary

ESPS0001 Introduction to History, Law, Politics and Philosophy; ESPS0003 European Integration; ESPS0016 German Political and Social Thought; GERM0010 Aspects of German History; GERM0030 Modern German Art: A Cultural History; CMII0026 Theoretical Issues in History and Literature

PhD Students (Completed) 

Primary Supervision

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan, A Comparative Study of Tropes of Cultural Pessimism in Postwar Britain and France (2008)

Mark Tilse, Transnationalism in the Prussian East, 1871-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

Jan Vermeiren, The First World War and German National Identity: The Dual Alliance at War (CUP, 2016)

Emmeline Burdett, The Continent of Murder: Disability and the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ Programme in the Euthanasia Debates of Britain and the United States, 1945-present (2011)

Matthew D’Auria, The Shaping of French National Identity: Narrating the Nation’s Past, 1715-1830 (CUP, 2021)

Lara Silberklang, Holocaust Survivors: Experiences of Displacement and Narratives of Self (2012)

John Goddard, Lokalisten and Sozialdemokraten: ‘Localist’ Trade Unionism in the German Building Industry, 1868-1893 (2015)

Ken Cheng, Proletarian Revolution and the Crisis of Modernity: German Orthodox Marxism and French Revolutionary Syndicalism,1889-1914 (2017)

Asmaa Soliman, European Muslims Transforming the Public Sphere: Religious Participation in the Arts, Media and Civil Society (Routledge, 2018)

Mathis Gronau, Surrounded by Enemies? The Experience of German Minorities in France and Britain between 1914 and 1924 (2022)

Secondary Supervision

History of Nazi Germany: Helen Whatmore, Julia Wagner, Julie Deering-Kraft, Tiia Sahrakorpi

History of the GDR and FRG: Mark Fenemore, Jeannette Madarasz, Merrilyn Thomas, Daniel Wilton, Damian Mac Con Uladh, Angela Brock, Esther von Richthofen, George Last, Christiane Wienand

Social Theory: Jon Bailes, Colette Vesey

Education

University of Oxford

Doctorate, Doctorate. | 1995

University of Oxford

First Degree, Bachelor of Arts (Honours) | 1990

Publications

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