Professor Tim Blanning

Faculty of History West Road Cambridge CB3 9EF Tel: (+44) (0)1223 335308 tcb1000@cam.ac.uk

Tim Blanning's research interests are focused on the history of continental Europe in the period 1660-1914. His early work concentrated on the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy during the eighteenth century and he retains a strong interest in this area. During the 1980s and 1990s his focus moved westwards to France during the Revolution, especially to its foreign policy and its interaction with the rest of Europe. A particular interest has been the reaction the revolutionaries' missionising campaigns to convert the rest of Europe to the principles of liberty, fraternity and equality. Most recently, he has concentrated on the high culture of Europe and its relationship to state power, which resulted in his prize-winning study The culture of power and power of culture 1660-1789. His general history of Europe in the period 1648-1815 - 'The Pursuit of Glory' - will be published by Penguin in April 2007. He has just completed a book 'The Triumph of Music in the Modern World', which examines why music has progressed from subordinate status in the early modern period to its present position of supremacy among the creative arts. This will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2008. He is also the general editor of The Oxford History of Modern Europe and of The Short Oxford History of Europe, editing personally the volumes on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the latter series. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1990.

Teaching

Professor Blanning runs a Part I course on 'Music in European society and culture 1750-2005'. He organises the course on European History 1715-1890, delivering personally about a third of the lectures. He contributes to the postgraduate M.Phil in Modern European History and is one of the convenors of the seminar in Modern European History.

Areas of Research Supervision

Tim Blanning has supervised projects dealing with political and cultural aspects of European history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Recent successful M.Phil. and Ph.D. candidates have worked on the Parlement of Paris in the eighteenth century, the origins of the French Revolution, Richard Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung, the response of the Catholic Church in France to the Revolution, State-building and nationhood in nineteenth century Germany, the emigration of German musicians to Great Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the interaction between foreign policy and religion in Britain during the first half of the eighteenth century, the Phil-Hellene movement in Britain in the nineteenth century, Jewish musicians and British society in Britain in the late-nineteenth century, Hungarian and German women's periodicals in the eighteenth century, Anglo-German cultural relations in the nineteenth century, the social and cultural context of Handel's oratorios, French museum culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and British foreign policy in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Chief Publications

Books:

• Joseph II and Enlightened Despotism (Longman, 1970. Published in the USA by Harper and Row, 1971) 168 pp.
• Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 1743-1803 (Cambridge University Press, 1974) 355 pp.
• The French Revolution in Germany (Oxford University Press, 1983) 353 pp.
• The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (Longman, 1986) 226 pp.
• The French Revolution: Aristocrats versus Bourgeois? (Macmillan, 1987) 70 pp. Published in Italy as Aristocrazia e borghesia nella rivoluzione francese by Sansoni in 1989 and in Portugal as Aristocratas versus burgueses? A Revolução Francesa by Editora Atica in 1991.
• Joseph II (Longman, 1994) 228 pp.
• The French Revolutionary Wars 1787-1802 (Edward Arnold, 1996)
• The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash? (Macmillan, 1997) [Second, revised and expanded edition of The French Revolution: Aristocrats versus Bourgeois?] 87 pp. [translated into Japanese by Iwanami Shoten Publishers 2004]
• The culture of power and the power of culture: old regime Europe 1660-1789 (Oxford University Press, 2002; paperback 2003) xiii + 479 pp. Published in Germany by Primus Verlag as Das Alte Europa 1660-1789: Kultur der Macht und Macht der Kultur.
• The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 (Penguin Books, 2007), pp. xxvii + 708.

• The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 1996) 362 pp. [translated into Japanese 2000 and Korean 2003]
• The rise and fall of the French Revolution (Chicago University Press, 1996) 513 pp.
• with David Cannadine (eds.), History and biography. Essays in honour of Derek Beales (Cambridge, 1996) 298 pp.
• with Peter Wende (eds.), Reform in Great Britain and Germany 1750-1850 (Oxford, 1999) 179 pp.
• The Short Oxford History of Europe, vol. 8: The eighteenth century and vol. 9: The nineteenth century (Oxford University Press, 2000) [translated into Spanish and Polish]
• The Oxford History of Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2000)
• with Hagen Schulze (eds.), Unity and Diversity in European Culture c. 1800 (Oxford, 2006) 213 pp.