Professor Robert Gildea
Professor of Modern History
Worcester College
Research Director
01865 (2)78348
I work on French and European history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular interests in the fall-out from the French Revolution, everyday life and resistance in the Second World War and 1968. I have written on collective memory and political culture in France and directed an international oral history project on Europe’s 1968. I am currently directing another international project on transnational approaches to resistance in Europe between the Spanish Civil War and the Cold War (1936-1948) and writing a book on the legacies of empire in France and Britain between 1940 and the present.
Fighters in the Shadows. A new history of the French Resistance (Faber & Faber 2015)
The story of the French Resistance is central to French identity, but it is a story built on myths. Not simply an effort to free the country from German occupation, it was part of a Europe-wide anti-fascist struggle, which included Spanish republicans, Italian and German anti-Nazis, communists, Jewish resisters and Christian rescuers. Robert Gildea returns to the testimonies of those involved, asking who they were, and what compelled them to take the terrible risks they did, bringing to the fore stories of the women resisters, whom history has neglected. Fighters in the Shadows is a vivid, gripping and entirely new account of one of the most compelling narratives of the Second World War.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/19/fighters-in-the-shadows-robert-gildea-review
Robert Gildea (ed) Europe’s 1968. Voices of Revolt (OUP, 2013)
By the late 1960s, in a Europe divided by the Cold War and challenged by global revolution in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, thousands of young people threw themselves into activism to change both the world and themselves. This new and exciting study of "Europe's 1968" is based on the rich oral histories of nearly 500 former activists collected by an international team of historians across fourteen countries. Activists' own voices reflect on how they were drawn into activism, how they worked and struggled together, how they combined the political and the personal in their lives, and the pride or regret with which they look back on those momentous years. Themes explored include generational revolt and activists' relationship with their families, the meanings of revolution, transnational encounters and spaces of revolt, faith and radicalism, dropping out, gender and sexuality, and revolutionary violence. Focussing on the way in which the activists themselves made sense of their revolt, Europe's 1968makes a major contribution to both oral history and memory studies. This ambitious study ranges widely across Europe from Franco's Spain to the Soviet Union, and from the two Germanys to Greece, and throws new light on moments and movements which both united and divided the activists of Europe's 1968.
http://blog.oup.com/2013/07/europes-1968-voices-of-revolt/
http://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/rezbuecher-21588
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