I am a historian of twentieth-century Europe, with a particular focus on the period of the two world wars, broadly defined. I hold an MA from Berlin’s Humboldt Universität and a DPhil from Oxford University where I also spent three years as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a further two years as a Lecturer at the History Faculty and at Balliol College. I am currently Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin and Director of the UCD Humanities Institute. I am also Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant project CivilWars.
Latest Publication
Political Commissars as a Transnational Phenomenon in Civil Wars
Sofya Anisimova and Robert Gerwarth
European Review of History
During the Russian Civil War, the Red Army integrated nearly 18,000 international volunteers. The Central Federation of Foreign Groups managed their political training by dispatching commissars. This article explores the Federation’s activities, the volunteer movement, and the origins of political commissars.
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Current Research Project
The Age of Civil Wars in Europe, c. 1914-1949
This project, funded by an ERC Advanced Grant (2022-2027) under grant agreement 101054647, challenges exceptionalist approaches to civil war. While it recognises that significant differences in causes, forms, and/or aftermaths existed between individual civil wars, it argues that those civil wars can only be fully understood as a phenomenon within a pan-European context.
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