Prof Tim Grady | University of Chester

Professor of History; Programme Leader MRes History, MA History & MA War, Conflict and Society

I have written two books on the history of Germany in the First World War and also published widely on twentieth century Jewish history. I am currently exploring the themes of war, occupation and the environment.

My research interests, which are fairly wide ranging, focus on the workings of memory, Jewish/non-Jewish relations in twentieth century Germany, the Holocaust, the First World War and more recently the environment in both East and West Germany.

I contribute to the teaching of the following undergraduate modules:

Spaces of Conflict: The First World War
Constructing History
Approaches to the Holocaust
Culture of Defeat: Weimar Germany and the Legacies of the First World War

I contribute to the teaching of the following postgraduate modules:

A Divided Past: Post-War Germany and the Nazi Past
War and Memory: Commemorating the World Wars in Western Europe
Research Dissertation

My research explores the social and cultural history of war and conflict in three interlocking areas. The first of these concerns the varied experiences of German Jews during and immediately after the First World War. In 2011, I wrote my first book on the contested memory of the Jewish soldiers in the war. I returned to this topic in 2017, when I published the first history of German-Jewish lives both at home and at the front during the conflict.

A second research interest developed in tandem with the centenary of the First World War. Building on a conference held in Chester in 2014 - ‘Minorities and the First World War’ – Dr Hannah Ewence and I launched the ‘Diverse Narratives’ project. Running from 2015-2018 and supported by HLF and AHRC funding, the project worked with community groups to explore the ‘hidden’ wartime history of minority groups in Cheshire.

My third research interest focuses on British-German relations in the wake of the two world wars. Looking in particular at the German war dead in Britain and British war graves in Germany, I have recently started to consider the ways in which individual graves and cemeteries often acted as sites for local and national reconciliation efforts in the two countries.

Areas of MRes and MPhil/PhD Supervision

War, Remembrance and Memory
Prisoners of War and Internment
Twentieth century German-Jewish History
War Veterans and Society
The First World War
Interwar Germany
The Second World War
Post-war Germany
Minorities and Conflict

Books

A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017).

Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2018 and for the Cundill History Prize 2018.

The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011).

Awarded proxime accessit for the Gladstone Prize of the Royal Historical Society.

Edited Volumes

T. Grady and R. Clark (eds), European Fascist Movements [Forthcoming with Routledge in 2023].

T. Grady, J. Crouthamel, M. Geheran and J. Köhne (eds), Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe (Oxford: Berghahn, 2018).

T. Grady and H. Ewence (eds), Minorities and the First World War: From War to Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Chapters and Articles

‘A Dance with Death: The Imperial War Graves Commission and Nazi Germany’, The English Historical Review, forthcoming 2022/3.

‘Landscapes of Interment: British Prisoner of War Camps and the Memory of the First World War’, Journal of British Studies, 58 (3) (2019), pp.543-64.

T. Grady, J. Crouthamel, M. Geheran and J. Köhne, ‘Introduction’, in T. Grady, J. Crouthamel, M. Geheran and J. Köhne (eds), Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe (Oxford: Berghahn, 2018), pp. 1-28.

‘Introduction. Minority History: From War to Peace’, in T. Grady and H. Ewence (eds), Minorities and the First World War: From War to Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 1-29.

‘Selective Remembering: Minorities and the Remembrance of the First World War’, in T. Grady and H. Ewence (eds), Minorities and the First World War: From War to Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) pp. 253-82.

‘A Shared Environment: German-German Relations along the Border, 1945-1972’, Journal of Contemporary History, 50 (3) (2015), pp. 660-79.

‘Krieg in der Erinnerung - Krieg um die Erinnerung. Das Gedenken an die jüdischen Gefallenen nach 1918’, in Ulrike Heikaus and Julia Köhne (eds), Krieg: Juden zwischen den Fronten, 1914-1918 (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2014), pp. 263-84.

Creating Difference: The Racialisation of Germany's Jewish Soldiers after the First World War’, Patterns of Prejudice, 46 (2012), pp. 318-38.

‘Germany’s Jewish Soldiers’, History Today, 61 (11) (2011), pp. 37-43.

Fighting a Lost Battle: The Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten and the Rise of National Socialism’, German History, 28 (1) (2010), pp. 1-20.

‘ “They died for Germany”: Jewish Soldiers, the German Army and Conservative Debates about the Nazi Past in the 1960s’, European History Quarterly, 39 (1) (2009), pp. 27-46.

‘A Common Experience of Death: Commemorating the German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War, 1914-1923’, in Alon Confino, Dirk Schumann and Paul Betts (eds), Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany (New York / Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), pp. 179-96.

‘Academic Antisemitism: The Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen and the Jews’, History Today, 52 (7) (2002), pp. 48-53.

BA (Keele)
MA (Southampton)
PhD (Southampton)