Dr Alison Carrol
Reader in European History

Summary

I am a historian of Modern Europe, and I am interested in the history of borders, borderlands, nationhood, and what it means to belong in modern Europe. Before joining Brunel, I was Junior Research Fellow at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge and Lecturer in Modern History at Birkbeck, University of London. I received the Etienne Baluze Prize in European Regional History, and I have been a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for European Global Studies, University of Basel, and at the Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a member of the Committee of the Society for the Study of French History, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Convenor of the IHR's Modern French History Seminar, and a member of the AHRC Peer Review College. I have received funding from the AHRC, the British Academy, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Humboldt Centre of the University of Bayreuth, the Society for the Study of French History, the German History Society and the Scouloudi Foundation. At Brunel, I teach on a number of core and compulsory modules across our degree programmes.

My current research focuses on the long history of the Channel tunnel, and was inspired by the question of where our ideas about borders come from. The starting point of this project is that while borders represent powerful symbols of national identity and historical continuity, they have been imagined and reimagined in a variety of ways, and have functioned differently across time periods and political regimes. I use a case study of the Channel Tunnel to think about what proposals for (and opposition to) a tunnel tell us about shifting ideas about borders, connection and cohesion in France and Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This research has been funded by a Brunel University London Athena Swan award, by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust and by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. The first article based on this research is available to read now in The Historical Journal. The Gerda Henkel Stiftung funded and produced a series of short video documentaries on the project, which is available to view here (click the 'English' tab to switch language) and recent pieces appeared in History Today and The Conversation to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the first Eurostar trains.

My work on the Channel tunnel was inspired by research on the border region of Alsace in the twentieth century. My book, The Return of Alsace to France, 1918-1939, asks what happened when the region of Alsace returned to France after almost fifty years of annexation into the German Empire: How did France attempt to make this German-speaking region French? How did the Alsatian popoulation see themselves? What did return mean for the region? I argue that return was not completed when French troops entered the region in 1918,  or indeed when return was ratified by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Rather I view return as a process that evolved over the following two decades, and involved a range of actors inside and outside Alsace. In order to investigate the meaning of return, I treated the border as a category of analysis, and analysed the ways in which return was shaped and driven by the national boundary between France and Germany, which lies along the east of Alsace. This book was shortlisted for the European Book Prize (awarded by the Council for European Studies) and I have published a number of articles and chapters on Alsace, most recently in French History, Contemporary European History, and The Conversation.

I am also interested in the relationship between borders, ideas of belonging and heritage. I will be developing this theme with my colleague Professor Astrid Swenson (University of Bayreuth), through a project entitled 'Borders of Belonging. Historical and Creative Methods in Heritage and Placemaking.' This has been funded by the Humboldt Centre (Bayreuth), and Brunel's Institute of Communities and Society.

Qualifications:

• PhD in History
• MA in European History
• BA (Hons) in History with European Study

Responsibility

UoA Lead for REF (History)

Director of Studies (History)

Co-Director of the Past in the Present Research Group