Professor Martin Conway

My research has been principally concerned with European history from the 1930s to the final decades of the twentieth century. Like many others, I was initially interested in the inter-war years, and my doctoral thesis explored the history of the extreme-right movement in Belgium, the Rexist movement, during the Second World War. Published in 1993 as Collaboration in Belgium: Léon Degrelle and the Rexist Movement 1940-1944, it was subsequently published in French and Dutch translations. The Catholic origins of the Rexist movement led me on to develop a wider interest in Catholic politics, and I have published a number of books and articles which have looked more generally at the shape of Catholic politics in Europe. I have also continued my interest in Belgium, and wrote a large-scale study of Belgium after its liberation in 1944. This was published in 2012 as The Sorrows of Belgium: Liberation and Political Reconstruction 1944-47. It too has come out in a French translation.

In the last few years, much of my work has concerned the history of Democracy in twentieth-century Europe. I have published a number of articles on the nature of democracy in post-war Europe, and published a large book entitled Europe's Democratic Age: Western Europe 1945-68, with Princeton University Press in the spring of 2020.

I am continuing to write about democracy, and am completing a collaborative project on the history of Social Justice in twentieth-century Europe. I have also begun a new project on Political Men, which seeks to problematise the forms of male political citizenship which have developed in Europe across the twentieth century. Its focus is consciously comparative, embracing a variety of political regimes and periods. Its underlying thesis is that we need to understand how male forms of political action have been a significant influence on the evolution of both democratic and non-democratic regimes.

I also have a strong interest in the concept of the History of the Present, as a distinct era separate from the more familiar span of the twentieth century. I am one of the editors (with Celia Donert and Kiran Patel) of a new book series published by Cambridge University Press, entitled European Histories of the Present.

I have written an account of the evolution of my historical interests here.

See page on Balliol College website