Professor Tom Buchanan

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

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

His research is mainly concerned with political and social interactions between Britain and the wider world in the twentieth century. He has written three books and numerous articles on the impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain. For many years he has been co-convenor of the seminar in Modern European History at the Faculty of History. He was Research Director of the Faculty’s Modern European History Research Centre, 2011-14.

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)
• “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).