Professor Richard J. Evans

Regius Professor of History
Chairman of the Faculty of History

Gonville and Caius College Cambridge CB2 1TA Tel: (+44) (0)1223 (3)32495 rje36@cam.ac.uk

Richard J. Evans's general area of research interest is German history, especially social and cultural history, since the mid-nineteenth century. He has worked on movements of emancipation and liberation, including the feminist movement and the labour movement, on social inequality in the urban environment, and on the social history of death and disease. More recently he has worked on crime and punishment, especially the death penalty in German history since the seventeenth century, where he has used archival evidence to bring a social and anthropological approach to bear on major theories of punishment and society, especially those developed by Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. His work on the history of crime has involved examining literary discourses and their interaction with social models of deviance, both those articulated by the authorities and those lived by deviants themselves. He also has an interest in historiography and the history of the discipline of history, and has recently written a new introduction to E. H. Carr's 'What is History?', using Carr's personal papers, and a new afterword to G. R. Elton's 'The Practice of History', based on Elton's private archive. Since acting as principal expert witness in the David Irving libel trial before the High Court in London in 2000, his work has dealt with Holocaust denial and the clash of epistemologies when history enters the courtroom. He is currently writing a large-scale history of the Third Reich; volume one, covering the period to July 1933, was published in October 2003, volume two, dealing with the years 1933-39, is scheduled for publication in October 2005, and volume 3, covering the years 1933-45, in September 2007. He has been Editor of the Journal of Contemporary History since 1998 and a judge of the Wolfson Literary Award for History since 1993. Over the years, his work has won the Wolfson Literary Award for History, the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, and the Hamburg Medaille für Kunst und Wissenschaft. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, and an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and Birkbeck College, London.

Teaching

Richard J Evans lectures on Papers 17 and 18 in Part I, and teaches the Core Course 'Controversies in Modern European History' and an Option on Britain and Germany since the 18th century for the MPhil in Modern European History. He supervises about 10 PhD students and runs a weekly graduate workshop on modern G

Areas of Research Supervision

Richard Evans has supervised research in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and comparative history while holding Chairs at the Universities of East Anglia and London, as well as more recently in Cambridge. Successful Ph.D. candidates have worked on the social and demographic history of an industrial village in nineteenth-century Germany; working-class culture in the Ruhr before 1914; criminology, antisemitism and the press in Vienna at the turn of the century; medievalism in British and German war memorials after 1918; the cult of the 'Hanseat' in public memory in Hamburg and Lübeck in the Imperial and Weimar periods; the political press in the Weimar Republic; tourism in Nazi Germany; state prisons in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich; suicide in the Third Reich; state prisons in the Third Reich; rituals of navalism in England and Germany before 1914; and women and national identity in Alsace-Lorraine under German and French rule, 1870-1945. Ph.D. theses in progress cover topics including the concept of 'heritage' in nineteenth-century Britain, France and Germany; suicide in the Third Reich; clandestine relations between the East and West Geman governments in the 1950s and 1960s; and re-education and the remaking of German national identity in the British and French zones of occupation after 1945. Richard Evans also supervises a wide range of M.Phil. dissertations in similar areas of modern German and comparative history.

Chief Publications

• The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933 (London, 1976)
• (Editor) Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978)
• Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830-1910 (Oxford, 1987)
• Rethinking German History (London, 1987)
• Kneipengespräche im Kaiserreich (Reinbek, 1988)
• In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York, 1989)
• Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1700-1987 (Oxford, 1996)
• Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1998)
• In Defence of History (2nd edn. with Reply to Critics, London, 2001, first pub. 1997)
• Telling Lies About Hitler: History, the Holocaust and the David Irving Trial (London, 2002)
• The Coming of the Third Reich (London, 2003)