Professor Tom Buchanan

Biography

I was educated at Wadham College, Oxford for my BA in History (1982) and at St Antony's. Oxford, for my DPhil (1987).

Teaching

I joined OUDCE as Director of Studies in History and Politics in 1990. I teach C19th and C20th British and European History, with a particular interest in mid-C20th Europe (from the 1930s to the 1960s). I teach an optional paper on the Spanish Civil War on the Undergraduate Certificate in History.

I have supervised DPhil students on topics connected to the Spanish Civil War and British C20th history. 

Research interests

My research is mainly concerned with political and social interactions between Britain and the wider world in the twentieth century. I have written three books and numerous articles on the impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain. My most recent books are East Wind: China and the British left, 1925-1976 (OUP, 2012) and Amnesty International and human rights activism in post-war Britain, 1945-1977 (CUP, 2020). The second edition of my book on post-war Europe (Europe’s Troubled Peace, from 1945 to the present), the final volume in the Blackwell/Wiley “History of Europe” series, was published in 2012. I have for many years been co-convenor of the seminar in Modern European History at the Faculty of History. I was Research Director of the Faculty’s Modern European History Research Centre, 2011-14. The papers from a conference on the centenary of the Balkan wars that I co-organised in 2012 (supported by the John Fell Fund) were published in 2015 (co-edited with James Pettifer) as War in the Balkans: Conflict and Diplomacy before World War One. I am currently completing work on a new collection of essays on British involvement in the Spanish Civil War (forthcoming with Liverpool University Press). I am also working on Harold Wilson’s connections to the developing world, from the late 1940s until the 1960s. 

Publications

Books:

The Spanish Civil War and the British Labour Movement (Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Political Catholicism in Europe, 1918-1965 (co-edited, with Martin Conway), (Oxford University Press, 1996)

Britain and the Spanish Civil War, (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Europe's Troubled Peace, 1945-2000 (Blackwell's, 2005)

The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain: War, loss and memory (Sussex Academic Press, 2006)

East Wind: China and the British Left:1925-1976 (OUP, 2012)

Amnesty International and human rights activism in post-war Britain, 1945-1977 (CUP, 2020) 

Forthcoming:

“Amnesty International and the Greek crisis of 1967-8” in an edited volume on The 1969 ‘Greek Case’ in the Council of Europe, (Bloomsbury)  

Presentations

"Beyond Cable Street: New approaches to the historiography of anti-fascism in Britain in the 1930s", international colloquium on "L'antifascisme en question". Paris (June 2013)

"Idealism, ideology and adventure: Narratives of the British Volunteers in the International Brigades", keynote lecture to the conference of the Society for the Study of Labour History, St Andrews University (November 2013)

"China and the British left in the C20th", University of Leeds History Department seminar (March 2014)

"Amnesty International and the Politics of Human Rights in post-war Britain", Northumbria University History Department seminar (March 2014)

“Amnesty International and the Politics of Human Rights in Britain since 1945” University of Padua, Nov. 2015

“Amnesty International and the Greek crisis of 1967-8”, conference on the “Greek case at the Council of Europe”, Athens (2019).

“Amnesty International and the forging of human rights activism in Britain, 1945-1977”, University of Munich (2020).

LSE International History Now series, Episode 9 - Dissenters and Dissent in Politics: From the Quakers to Amnesty International: https://www.lse.ac.uk/International-History/Podcasts/International-History-Now (2022)

“Political Imprisonment and the origins of Amnesty International”, workshop at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari (2022).