About the Lecture

Leverhulme Visiting Professor Robert Gerwarth will give four major public lectures, the ‘Leverhulme lectures on the History of Civil Wars’. Two of these Leverhulme Lectures will be delivered at Oxford and a further two at Edinburgh University and Queen’s University Belfast.

Professor Gerwarth will share his particular expertise on the history of war, violence, and conflict in the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, Gerwarth will provoke wide-ranging discussion about the prevalence of civil violence, and how far that violence should be understood as imitative, self-contained, or part of a wider culture of European conflicts.

The Speaker

Professor Robert Gerwarth (Leverhulme Visiting Professor at University of Oxford)

Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He studied History and Politics in Berlin and Oxford where he also held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Since then he has published ten books on aspects of political violence in Europe, most of them translated into several languages. Among his more recent publications are The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (Allen Lane, 2016) and November 1918: The German Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2020). In 2020-21, he is giving the Leverhulme Lectures on the history of civil wars at Queen's University Belfast, Oxford University, and the University of Edinburgh.

The Chair

Professor Richard English (Director of The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen's University Belfast)

Richard English is Director of the Mitchell Institute, and a Professor of Politics at Queen's University.  His research focuses on political violence and on nationalism, his books including the award-winning studies Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (2003) and Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (2006). He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2019 he was awarded the Royal Irish Academy's Gold Medal in the Social Sciences.