In the summer of 2005, the History Faculties of Oxford and Princeton Universities launched a joint research project intended to dig beneath the surface of the post-1945 world. The project was funded by a grant from the Oxford-Princeton partnership and ran for two years from 2005 to 2007.

Oxford and Princeton’s History departments are pre-eminent centres for the comparative study of twentieth-century history and have a particular research strength in the study of the conflicts of the mid-century era. By bringing together historians from the two institutions, the project asked new and exciting questions about the way in which the contemporary world emerged from the Second World War. Central to the research project was the need to compare the different geographical arenas of the immediate post-war world. If in recent years we had begun to confront the contrasting experiences of eastern and western Europe, there was also a need to go a stage further and to place those European experiences in the wider context of the process of reconstruction of East Asia (notably China, Korea and Japan). This research project was therefore a “double collaboration” involving historians from Princeton and Oxford, but also historians of Europe and Asia. Parallel seminars were held in Princeton and Oxford during the autumn terms of 2005 and 2006, and historians from the two institutions met in workshops held in the springs of 2006 and 2007.

The project was directed by a working group of six historians from the two institutions. On the Oxford side, Martin Conway was, at the beginning of the project, the Research Director of the Modern European History Research Centre, and is a historian of Western Europe. Tom Buchanan is a historian of Britain and Europe, and has also worked on relations between the European left and the revolutions of East Asia; while Rana Mitter is a historian of twentieth-century China. On the Princeton side, Jan Gross is the author of a series of important works on Polish history and society, Philip Nord is a historian of twentieth-century France, and Sheldon Garon is a distinguished historian of twentieth-century Japan.

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