Professor Robert Gerwarth gave this Leverhulme Trust Lecture, 'An Age of Civil Wars: Europe, 1912-49' at 5pm on 4 April 2022 in the Playfair Library, Old College, University of Edinburgh

In 2021-22 Leverhulme Visiting Professor Gerwarth gave four major public lectures, the ‘Leverhulme Lectures on the History of Civil Wars’. Two of these Leverhulme Lectures were delivered at Oxford and a further two at Queen’s University Belfast and at the University of Edinburgh.

Professor Gerwarth shared his particular expertise on the history of war, violence, and conflict in the first half of the 20th century. In particular, Gerwarth provoked 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

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

Alvin Jackson is Richard Lodge Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh.  Jackson studied at Oxford University, and has taught both at University College Dublin and – as Professor of Modern Irish History - at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of seven books, including The Two Unions:  Ireland, Scotland and the Survival of the United Kingdom, 1707-2007 (OUP: 2012); and he has also edited the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (OUP: 2014). At present he is working on a comparative history of multinational union states in a project supported by the Leverhulme Trust. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and an honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy. 

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