Professor Richard J Evans FBA

Professor Richard J. Evans FBA is Regius Professor of Modern History and President of Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge. 

He has lectured extensively all over the world at a variety of literary festivals and events, is widely published and is a frequent contributor to the broadcast media and the press.  He has been Editor of the Journal of Contemporary History since 1998 and a judge of the Wolfson Literary Award for History since 1993.  His most recent publication was the third volume of his monumental large-scale history of the Third Reich, The Third Reich at War, which was published in 2008.

Professor Evans's area of research interest lies predominantly in German history, especially social and cultural history, since the mid-nineteenth century.  He has worked on movements of emancipation and liberation, including the feminist movement and the labour movement, on social inequality in the urban environment, and on the social history of death and disease.  His work on the history of crime has involved examining literary discourses and their interaction with social models of deviance, both those articulated by the authorities and those lived by deviants themselves.  Since acting as principal expert witness in the David Irving libel trial before the High Court in London in 2000, his work has dealt with Holocaust denial and the clash of epistemologies when history enters the courtroom.

Professor Evans' 2011/12 series of lectures as Professor of Rhetoric is The Rise and Fall of European Empires from the 16th to the 20th Century. The description for the lecture series is as follows:

Empire has been the defining world experience of the modern era. Already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European powers put their stamp on the Americas. After the decline of the old pre-industrial empires in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new empires arose, as Europe raced ahead of the rest of the world in terms of economic and military power. In 1800, Europe and its colonies and ex-colonies covered just over half the land surface of the world; by 1914 this proportion had increased to nearly 85 per cent. By the Second World War, the only major inhabited areas of the world that had never been under European rule were China, Ethiopia, Japan, Mongolia, Persia, Siam, and Tibet. Yet within little more than thirty years, these great global empires had almost all collapsed, and by the end of the twentieth century, all that was left were a few isolated and fragmentary colonial possessions. This series of six lectures examines the rise and fall of the great European empires in a transnational and comparative framework, taking in not only the British and French experience but also that of other major and minor European colonial powers such as Germany, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Russia and Spain. The lectures conclude with a discussion of the impact of empire and imperialism in the twenty-first century.

Professor Evans' previous series of lectures as Gresham Professor of Rhetoric were as follows:
  2010/11 The Victorians: Culture and Experience in Britain, Europe and the World, 1815-1914
  2009/10 War and Peace in Europe: From Napoleon to the Kaiser
Previously, he delivered two series of lectures as Visiting Professor of History.

All his past lectures may be accessed here.