Dr Christian Goeschel

Biography

I joined Manchester after working for several years at Birkbeck, University of London, and the Australian National University.

I am an expert of modern Europe, with a principal, though not exclusive focus on Italy and modern Germany. I have a strong interest in the comparative and transnational history of twentieth-century Europe. In 2018, I published my monograph on the entangled history of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany (Yale University Press, 2018). In this book, translated into several languages (including Italian, with Laterza, and German, with Suhrkamp), I ask how a new history of European fascism can be told through the perspective of the cultural history of diplomacy.

The question of how ruthless leaders ‘taking back control’ of their countries brought the world to war was not my central question when I began researching the book in 2011, but it is a question that captured my attention as I was completing it in the summer of 2017.

Mussolini and Hitler is also available as an Audiobook. A Danish translation was published by Kristeligs Dagblads Forlag in 2018.

My earlier work was on the social and cultural history of Weimar and Nazi Germany, and my first monograph was the 2009 Suicide in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press; German translation with Suhrkamp, 2011). I have also worked on repression and control in the Third Reich and have co-edited and co-authored with Nikolaus Wachsmann The Nazi Camps, 1933-1939: A Documentary History (Nebraska University Press, 2012) and a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History.

I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a former Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.

At Manchester, I lead the 'Politics, Institutions, and Ideas' research group, together with Prof. Frank Mort. We also lead the Cultures of Diplomacy research network, together with Dr Thomas Tunstall-Allcock.  

I co-convene the international Rethinking Modern Europe seminar series at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and sit on the editorial advisory board of European History Quarterly.