Conor Muller

Bluesky: @conormuller.bsky.social

Research Topic: Franco-British People Smuggling, 1800–1815

My research interests focus on connections and conflicts between people, places, countries, and social classes from the French Revolution to the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. My project explores the illegal wartime migration and trafficking of people between British and French territories and how this was managed and policed by evolving laws and regulations which sought to gather information about the movements, identities, and nationalities of migrants. This research encompasses several legal and political categories of temporary and permanent migrants, including travellers, refugees, artisans, traders, smugglers, escaped prisoners, and enslaved people in metropolitan and colonial settings to show how these groups, as well as those who assisted them, navigated and evaded these emerging legal and political frameworks for controlling migration.

Now a second-year DPhil student on the Global and Imperial History strand, I previously studied History at the University of York and spent a year as a visiting student at the University of Pennsylvania. I then received my MPhil in Modern British History from the University of Cambridge, funded by St Catharine's College, where my MPhil dissertation earned a distinction and was deposited in the Seeley Historical Library. I began my DPhil at Oxford in October 2023, fully funded by the Sir Colin R. Lucas Studentship in French History at Balliol College.

From January to June 2025, I will be a visiting researcher at in the Centre for History at Sciences Po Paris.

Awards & funding

Beit Fund Research Grant, University of Oxford, 2024–25

Oxford-Sir Colin R. Lucas Studentship in French History, Balliol College and University of Oxford, 2023–26

Postgraduate History Bursary, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, 2021

US Alumni Connections Award (for University of Pennsylvania), University of York, 2019

Publications

Review of Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions, edited by Jan C. Jansen and Kirsten McKenzie, International Review of Social History (2024). doi.org/10.1017/S0020859024000920.

‘“No Pity – I Claim Only Justice”: Radical Memory of the Peterloo Massacre among the English Working Class, 1819–1848.’ Penn History Review 27 (2020), 41–58. repository.upenn.edu/phr/vol27/iss1/4/. 

‘Donors and Enslavers in Penn’s 1772 Subscriptions.’ Penn and Slavery Project (2020). pennandslaveryproject.org/files/original/9ac827819f96bbeee25c7b8720485da0.pdf. 

Talks and seminar presentations

'The Scottish Martyrs in Jacobin France, 1793–94: Recognition, Universalism, and National Hatred', Long Eighteenth Century Workshop, University of Cambridge, 19 November 2024.

'Deportation and Repatriation from Britain and France at War, 1789–1819', Global & Imperial History Seminar, University of Oxford, 1 March 2024.

Teaching

• Balliol College Floreat Access Programme in the Humanities:
  • The French Revolution, 1789
  • Protest against the Cold War in Europe, 1956–91
• History Faculty PLTO

Key words

French Revolution, migration, incarceration, radicalism, mobility, coercion, law, prisoners of war, displacement, smuggling, transnational history, English Channel, Age of Revolutions, Atlantic World.

Supervisor: Erica Charters