Dr Sara McQuaid

I am a social and cultural historian of modern Europe, specialising in political violence, selfhood and subjectivity, and transnational approaches to twentieth-century Germany, Italy, and Ireland.

I completed my doctorate at Oxford, where I was a Clarendon Scholar and the Peter Storey Scholar of History at Balliol College. My research was also supported by the AHRC OOC-DTP. I hold a BA in History from Trinity College Dublin and an ELAN Certificate from Heidelberg University.

I am currently a Theodor Heuss Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, based at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Research Interests

My doctoral research brought a series of political assassinations carried out by right-wing groups in Weimar Germany and Fascist Italy into comparative perspective for the first time.

Drawing on the striking collection of ego-documents produced by the assassins themselves, my work foregrounded how these figures narrated and performed themselves in different contexts and for different audiences across the shifting regimes of twentieth-century Europe. This involved tracing how their attempts to explain themselves and grapple with their own notoriety intertwined with society's efforts to comprehend these momentous acts of violence, and how both interacted with broader public scripts and processes of meaning-making.

My current project explores how West German and Italian actors perceived and responded to ‘the Troubles’ – the violent political-sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland – while each country grappled with its own experiences of political violence and unrest, against the backdrop of European integration.