University of Swansea, United Kingdom

e-mail: l.s.james@swansea.ac.uk

Personal Website

Principal Investigator
'German Military Encounters with Eastern Europe: Experience and Commemoration, 1812-1914'

 

Leighton S. James studied at the universities of Cardiff and Glamorgan. He is currently Senior Lecturer in European History at Swansea University. His research focuses on social and military history of eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe. He previously examined the social and political history of the Ruhr and south Wales mining regions in his book, The Politics of Identity and Civil Society: The Miners in the Ruhr and South Wales, 1890-1926. Recently his research focus has turned to the experience and legacy of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. From 2005 to 2008 he was member of the AHRC-funded project ‘Nations, Borders and Identities: The Experience of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Europe’ based at York University. His research on the German and Austrian experience of the conflict was published in 2013 under the title, Witnessing the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in German Central Europe, 1792 to 1815.  

Selected Publications from "Mapping War, Mapping Europe"

• 'Violence and the Barbaric East: Germans and the Russian Campaign of 1812', in: Peripheral Visions: European Military Expeditions as Cultural Encounters in the Long 19th Century, ed. by John Horne and Joseph Clarke, (in submission, expected in 2017).  

Selected Publications

• Witnessing the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in German Central Europe, 1792 to 1815 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

• The Politics of Identity and Civil Society: The Miners in the Ruhr and South Wales, 1890-1926 (Manchester: MUP, 2008)

• ‘War, Experience and Memory: An Austrian Cavalry Officer narrates the Napoleonic Wars’, in Alan Forest, Etienne François and Karen Hagemann (eds), War Memories: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Modern European Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 41-58.

• ‘Invasion and Occupation: Civilian-Military Relations in Central Europe during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’ in Eve Ronsenhaft, Hannah Smith and Erika Charters (eds), Civilians and War in Europe, 1618-1815 (Liverpool: LUP, 2012), pp. 221-236.

• ‘Die Koalitionskriege (1792-1815) in der österreichischen Erinnerungskultur – am Beispiel der ,,Tagebücher‘‘ des Husarenoffiziers Michael Freiherr Pauliny von Köwelsdamm‘, in Laurence Cole, Christa Hämmerle and Martin Scheutz (eds), Glanz-Gewalt-Gehorsam: Militär und Gesellschaft in der Habsburgermonarchie (1800 bis 1918) (Essen: Klartext, 2011), pp. 221-242.