Dr Will Clement

Position

Departmental Lecturer in Modern British and European History and Associate of Brasenose College

Qualifications

BA (Dunelm) MSt DPhil (Oxon)

Academic Background and Previous Positions

I studied History at Durham (2012), before coming to Oxford for an MSt in Modern British and European History at Pembroke College (2013) and a DPhil in History at St John’s College (2018). Prior to arriving at Brasenose, I worked as a Visiting Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London (2018-19) and a College Lecturer at St John’s College in Oxford (2019). I joined Brasenose in October 2019.

Undergraduate Teaching Areas

Modern British and European History, c. 1780-1900

Undergraduate theses I have recently supervised include work on emotions during French Revolutionary festivals, the urban and military history of nineteenth-century Lyon in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, rebellious nuns in eighteenth-century Paris, internationalist socialism and the Paris Commune of 1871, identity in Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War, and British sport and identity in the south of France during the nineteenth century.

Graduate Teaching Areas

I welcome research students in Modern European History, particularly those interested in France in the long nineteenth century.

Masters students I have recently supervised include work on female travel writers during the French Revolution, the relationship between environment and French national identity in the nineteenth century, German monument building in the nineteenth century, iconoclasm in post-Revolutionary Lyon, provincial responses to the Paris Commune of 1871, and French-Romanian diplomatic relations.


Research Interests

My research focuses on the social, cultural, and urban history of France in the long nineteenth century. I am interested in the history of the state’s relationship with housing and hygiene as well as the history of religious conflict in an urban context and the history of urban environmental disasters. I am currently preparing a book on the history of ‘unsanitary housing inspectors’ in nineteenth-century France.

My next project is a microhistorical work of environmental history. I will explore the impact of a devastating flood of 1856 in the south of France on urban populations, construction, and politics. My research also explores the way that religion operated or came under challenge in French cities in an era of radical growth. This has led to my writing about the national and international aftermath of a blasphemous bar crawl in the northern French city of Roubaix as well as a forthcoming article on Catholic petitions for a new church in a Calvinist-dominated Alsatian city.

Publications

‘The Christ in the cabaret: putting a blasphemous bar crawl on trial in Third Republic France’, Cultural and Social History, vol. 17, issue 2 (2020), pp. 189-205.

‘The ‘Unrealizable Chimera’: workers’ housing in nineteenth-century Mulhouse’, French History, vol. 32, issue 1, (2018), pp. 66–85.

Email

[email protected]