Connect
About
Dr Artemis Photiadou is Assistant Professor in International History. Her research interests focus on intelligence, internment, and political violence in Britain and its Empire, as well as in Europe.
Her first book, Interrogating Nazism (Cambridge University Press, 2026), is the first comprehensive study of British interrogations during the Second World War. In the effort to defeat Nazi Germany, Britain interrogated hundreds of thousands of suspected spies, enemy soldiers, and war criminals. While these interrogations primarily served military and legal purposes, they also became a means of understanding enemy psychology. Interrogators asked questions that no other source could answer in any depth: Why did German soldiers’ morale remain high despite catastrophic defeats? Why did some Allied nationals collaborate with occupying authorities? How likely were Germans to embrace democracy after the war? The answers were obtained through a combination of direct questioning, concealed microphones used to record prisoner conversations, and decoys posing as genuine prisoners. Interrogating Nazism therefore shows how sophisticated and valuable interrogation was in this war and how it helped Britain comprehend the enemy it was fighting.
Dr Photiadou’s research on pertinent topics has been published in The English Historical Review, The Historical Journal, Journal of Contemporary History, and Intelligence and National Security.
At LSE, Dr Photiadou teaches and supervises topics on international relations since 1890, British foreign policy, and British intelligence. She has been nominated by students for various teaching awards in recent years, including for Inspirational Teaching, for Excellent Welfare and Pastoral Support, and for Excellent Feedback and Communication.
Before joining LSE, she trained as a lawyer and worked in research roles at Full Fact, UCL, and the LSE Public Policy Group. From 2015 to 2022, she served as Managing Editor of the LSE British Politics and Policy blog. Dr Photiadou currently serves on the editorial board of LSE EUROPP, is a Research Affiliate at the Hellenic Observatory, and leads the International History Department’s research cluster on Conflict and Identity in Europe since the 18th century.
Other titles: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Representative
Expertise
Britain and Europe; European Political Regimes; Intelligence History
Research
- LSE International History Department Class Teacher Awards (highly commended, 2019).
- LSE Students’ Union Teaching Excellence Awards (nominated 2019, 2020 and 2021).
- LSE PhD Studentship, 2015-2019.
Teaching
Dr Artemis Photiadou teaches the following courses
At undergraduate level
At postgraduate level
Engagement and impact
News
Dr Artemis Photiadou publishes new article, 'The ABCs of Nazism: The Political Screening and Classification of German Prisoners of War in Britain in the Aftermath of the Second World War'
In her recent article, published in The English Historical Review (Oxford Academic), she discusses how nearly half a million German prisoners of war were in Britain when the Second World War ended, all of whom were sorted into one of three categories: anti-Nazi, unpolitical, or Nazi, correspondingly known as A, B, C.
This article focuses on the screening process that determined in which category an individual belonged. Drawing on approximately 400,000 screening outcomes between 1945 and 1947, it shows that the process was developed in a wartime intellectual environment that attributed National Socialism to a militant German ‘national character’.
Under those initial assumptions, many of those interrogated were classified as Nazi. However, the system quickly moved towards a more situational interpretation of ideology, turning screening into a convenient tool that facilitated practical policy objectives, rather than a mechanism of ideological classification.
Read the article in full HERE