Dr Tim Wilson



Email: tkw2Pasted Graphicst-andrews.ac.uk

Tim Wilson’s research and teaching focuses upon comparative approaches to the study of inter-communal violence across Europe and the Middle East. He is especially interested in the relationships between group identity and violence in ‘identity-based conflicts’ and, in particular, in the ways in which communal identities may help structure conflict dynamics at the grassroots. He studied history at Oxford in the early 1990s before working in the community sector in Belfast during the peace process years in Northern Ireland. A return to academia via a master’s degree in Comparative Ethnic Conflict at Queen’s, Belfast, led to a doctoral thesis at Oxford University under the supervision of Dr Marc Mulholland. This project, an integrated comparative study of the north of Ireland and Upper Silesia the years after 1918, formed the basis of his first book which was nominated for the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize. From 2000 he has taught a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses at Queen’s, Belfast and Oxford Brookes. He joins St Andrews from Oxford University where he was a Departmental Lecturer in Modern History from 2009 to 2011.He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2012,


Selected Publications

Books

Frontiers of Violence: Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 1918-1922 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010)

fronteirs_of_violence

Reactions to Frontiers of Violence

  • ‘an important contribution to the historiography of inter-communal conflict’, Robert Gerwarth, Times Literary Supplement
  • ‘This fine study….advances our understanding of the nature of communal violence… What impresses most about this study is its forensic rigor, its attention to detail, and its balance.’David R. C. Hudson, Journal of British Studies
  • ‘His set of questions constitutes a step forward in the methodology of writing the history of political and ethnic violence, and his research is excellent.. the book is an important one.’ T. Hunt Tooley, English Historical Review
  • ‘The strength of T.K.Wilson’s very fine book lies in its original thematic approach of comparing Ulster and Upper Silesia as sites of violent conflict in postwar Europe… it certainly suggests many avenues of future comparative explorations.’ – Terence Dooley, The American Historical Review

Frontiers of Violence was nominated by Oxford University Press for the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize.

Amazon Link

‘”Almost Frantic with Joy”: the Nicholson Revival and the Belfast Troubles, 1922-3’ in B. Griffin (ed) Irish Studies in Britain: New Perspectives on History and Literature (Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010)


Articles

‘Frank Wright Revisited’, Irish Political Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3 (September 2011)

‘“The most terrible assassination that has yet stained the name of Belfast”: the McMahon Murders in Context’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 37, No. 145 (May 2010)

‘The Polish-German Ethnic Dispute in Upper Silesia, 1918-1922: A Reply to Tooley’, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, 32 (2005)

‘Ritual and Violence in Upper Silesia and Ulster, 1920’, Journal of the Oxford University History Society, 1 (2004)