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Professor David Hopkin

Tutorial Fellow in History

Professor of European Social History

david.hopkin@hertford.ox.ac.uk

David Hopkin studied history at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, from 1985 to 1988. He returned to Cambridge in 1994 to pursue his doctorate under the supervision of Peter Burke and Bob Scribner. He was a Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College from 1997 to 1999 and lecturer, then senior lecturer, in the Department of Economic and Social History, University of Glasgow, from 1999. He joined Hertford as Fellow and Tutor in History in 2005. He was made Professor of European Social History in 2017.

Undergraduate teaching

David Hopkin teaches modern European history. He provides tutorials for the 1st year (prelims) papers General History 4 Society, Nation and Empire 1815-1914, Foreign Text Tocqueville, and the Optional Subjects The French Revolution and Empire and Brigands in a Landscape: Banditry, Rural Crime and Rebellion in the Mediterranean and Black Sea Regions, c.1750-1950. For finals students (2nd and 3rd years) he convenes the Further Subject L’Année Terrible 1870-71: War, Revolutions and the Rise and Fall of Empires, and he provides tutorials for the nineteenth and twentieth century EWF History papers. He teaches historiography both at prelims and finals, and supervises undergraduate theses and bridge essays (for the school of History and Modern Languages).

Recent thesis and bridge essay titles include:

  • ‘Méchante mère’: Infanticide in the folk ballads of nineteenth-century France
  • Voices of Salento: Identity in Traditional Song and Rituals of the ‘Terra d’Otranto’, c.1900 to the Present Day
  • Depictions of Transgressive Female Behaviour in 18th and 19th Century Spanish pliegos sueltos
  • The Power of Play: Exploring French Society, Politics and Culture through Printed Board Games, 1770-1830 (winner of the Richard Cobb prize 2019)
  • Eduardo Minichini and the theatre of the Camorra
  • The Music of George Butterworth and the Reception of the English Pastoral, 1910-1939
  • The Female Soldier in Street Literature and Oral Culture in the German Speaking Lands, c. 1600-1950
  • The Charlton Horn Fair and London Plebeian Culture, 1700-1872
  • La Bête est Morte: The Second World War and National Identity in French Bande Dessinée
  • Lieutenant Bilse’s ‘Aus einer Kleinen Garnison’ and the Politics and Culture of the German Officer-Corps
  • Descaves’ Sous-offs: Challenging the arche-sainte of the Third Republic

Graduate teaching

David Hopkin teaches on the core course for the Modern British and European History Masters degrees. He runs an optional paper on Peasant Societies, Economies and Polities in Western Europe, c.1750-c.1950 for the Masters courses in Economic and Social History. He is currently supervising five doctoral students on topics relating to European social, cultural and military history, c. 1700-c.1940. He welcomes graduate applications in the fields of European popular culture, historical anthropology, rural and maritime societies, and military history.

Current and recent doctoral and masters theses titles include:

  • Dialect Writing in the French, English and Jersey Regional Press
  • Inalienable Land? Lived Experiences of ‘Remembrement’ in a 1980s Normandy Village
  • Popular Political Song in Eighteenth-Century Liège and Lille
  • The Victorian Cavalryman: A Social Study of the King’s Dragoon Guards and the Queen’s Bays
  • The Servant Problem in Britain and France, 1900-1940
  • French Regionalists and the First World War
  • ‘Misery in the Moorlands’: Lived Bodies in the Landes de Gascogne, 1870-1914
  • The Language Question in Napoleonic France
  • The People’s Risorgimento? Italian National Discourses and Popular Culture in Tuscany, 1846-1860
  • Pacification, Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Valencia 1812-1813