Research Interests

David Motadel is Associate Professor of International History at the LSE. He works on the history of modern Europe and Europe’s global entanglements.

He is the author of a book on the history of Muslims under German rule in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2014; translated into nine languages), ranging from North Africa and the Balkans to the Caucasus and the Crimea, and the editor of a volume on Islam in the European Empires (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Among his current projects is a global history of Europe’s empires in the era of the Second World War, 1935-1948, which is under contract with Penguin Press (Allen Lane). Some first results were published in ‘The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt Against Empire’ in the American Historical Review.

David Motadel has also a more general interest in global history. His co-authored article ‘The Futures of Global History’, published in the Journal of Global History in 2018, led to a lively debate in the field. He is the co-editor of The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire (Princeton University Press, 2019) and the editor of Revolutionary World:Global Upheaval in the Modern Age (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

His articles have been published in a number of journals, including Past and Present, the American Historical Review, the Historical Journal, the Journal of Contemporary History, the Journal of Global History, and the Annales.

David Motadel also regularly writes on history and current affairs for newspapers and magazines. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, and Literary Review, among others.

Biography

David Motadel studied in Germany, Switzerland, and England. He completed his MPhil (2006) and PhD (2010) in History at the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar. His doctoral dissertation was awarded several prizes, including the Prince Consort Prize and Seeley Medal of the University of Cambridge for the best history dissertation of the year. He subsequently took up a Research Fellowship in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge (2010-15). He joined the LSE in 2016 as Assistant Professor of International History and became Associate Professor of International History in 2019. Dr. Motadel has held visiting positions at Harvard (2007-8), Yale (2009-10), Oxford (2011-12), Sciences Po (2018-19), and the Sorbonne (2018-19). He was also a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (2019-20). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2018, he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for History.

Prizes

• Philip Leverhulme Prize, 2018
• Fraenkel Prize, 2014
• Walter Laqueur Prize, 2014
• Prince Consort Prize and Seeley Medal of the University of Cambridge, 2011
• Doctoral Dissertation Prize of the British International History Group, 2011
• Doctoral Dissertation Prize of the German Historical Institute London, 2011
• Essay Prize of the German History Society and the Royal Historical Society, 2007

A dedicated teacher, David Motadel has also been awarded the LSE Excellence in Education Award (2018) and the LSE Promotions Teaching Prize (2019).

Other titles

LSE-Columbia University Double MSc in International and World History Programme Director;
Coordinator of LSE-Columbia University Double Degree Dissertations (HY458)