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 and the urban and military history of Lyon in the middle decades of 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 am currently supervising are working on topics including female travel writers during the French Revolution and the relationship between environment and French national identity in the nineteenth century.

Research Interests

My research focuses on the social, cultural, and urban history of France in the long nineteenth century. My doctorate explored the history of workers’ housing in the era before state social housing legislation. With little direction from the central state, the issue of workers’ housing became a crucial nexus around which provincial elites sought to explore and create their own distinct identities. I am now preparing a book on the history of ‘unhealthy housing inspectors’ in nineteenth-century France.

My recent work explores how issues of class and religion interacted in French industrial cities, ranging from examining petitions for new church construction through to analysing why a sacrilegious bar crawl became scandalous international news in 1874.

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]