Robert Saunders is Reader in Modern British History at the School of History, Queen Mary University of London. He specialises in modern British history, from the early 19th century to the present, focusing particularly on political history and the history of ideas. His research ranges from the history of democracy to the relationship between Britain and the European Union. Currently he is researching a new history of democracy in Britain. His book Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain (Cambridge University Press 2018) won the American Historical Association’s Morris D. Forkosch Prize (2019).

Recent publications include: ‘Brexit and Empire: ‘Global Britain’ and the Myth of Imperial Nostaligia’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48:6 (2020) 1140-1174; “A Great and Holy War”: Religious Routes to Women’s Suffrage’ English Historical Review 134:571 (2019) 1471-1502; ‘Doubtful Democrats: Democracy in Britain since 1800’ Journal of Modern European History 17:2 (2019).

Supervision areas: history of democracy and of electoral reform in Britain since 1830, politics and religion in Britain since 1801, the idea of America in British 19th-century politics, Britain and the European Community/Union.

Jörn Leonhard is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History of Western Europe at the Historisches Seminar of the University of Freiburg (Albrecht-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg). His research focuses on European history and global historical perspectives on the 19^th and 20^th centuries, particularly on the topics of war and peace, empires and nation states as well as liberalism and nationalism.

He has published several award-winning and internationally recognised monographs, most recently Über Kriege und wie man sie beendet. Zehn Thesen (München: C.H. Beck) in 2023. His work has received numerous awards, including the State Research Prize in 2010 and most recently the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation in 2024. He has been a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2015, and was elected to the Leopoldina in 2024.

OrcID: 0000-0002-7213-1611

Recent publications include: Empires – Eine globale Geschichte 1780-1920 (München: C.H. Beck 2023) with U. von Hirschhausen; Pandora’s Box. A History of the First World War (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press 2020); Die überforderte Frieden. Versailles und die Welt 1918-1923 (München: C.H. Beck 2019).

Richard Toye is Professor of Modern History at the University of Exeter. He previously worked at the University of Cambridge. He has written widely on modern British and international political and economic history. His critically acclaimed book Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness won him the 2007 Times Higher Young Academic Author of the Year Awards. His research focuses on the history of twentieth century British and international politics.

OrcID: 0000-0003-3200-7525

Recent publications include: ‘Witness Seminar: Writing to Politicians’ Parliamentary History 43:2 (2024) 226-248; ‘The Discourse of ‘The People’s War’ in Britain and the USA during World War II’ The English Historical Review 138:594-595 (2023) 1089-1117, with S. Dettman; Age of Hope. Labour, 1945, and the Birth of Modern Britain (London: Bloomsbury Publishing 2023).

Supervision areas: History of rhetoric, UK electoral politics, political writing, Parliamentary history in the ‘British world’.

Since 2011, Margit van der Steen has been working at Huygens Institute as managing director of the national Political History Research School (OPG). In 2024 she became treasurer to the Association for Political History. 

Her research and publications are in the fields of political history, biography and gender issues. 

Recent publications include ‘Housewives in politics: Local pioneers in the Netherlands after the enfranchisement‘ Journal of Modern European History 18:3 (2020) 264-268; The Ideal of Parliament in Europe since 1800 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2019) edited with R. Aerts, et al.

Lauren Lauret is assistant professor in Dutch History at Leiden University. Between 2022 and 2024 she was a Dutch Research Council Rubicon post-doctoral fellow at University College London. She is the secretary of the APH.

Her research focuses on how the political elite (re)claimed power after experiencing disruption, with a particular focus on the impact of colonialism on Dutch and British political practice.

OrcID: 0000-0002-5977-0689

Recent publications include ‘No Emancipation without Compensation: Slave Owners’ Petitions and the End of Slavery in the Netherlands, c. 1833-1873‘ BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review (2024) 1-24; ‘Citizenship categories and their legacies in the Dutch post-colonial politics’, in: S. de Lange, a.o. (ed.), The Oxford handbook of Dutch politics (Oxford University Press 2024) 351-367, with. K. Fatah-Black; Serving the chain? De Nederlandsche Bank and the last decades of slavery, 1814-1863 (Leiden University Press 2023) with K. Fatah-Black and J. van den Tol.

Jon Lawrence is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Exeter. He works on British social, political and cultural history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Between 2018-2023 he was a Co-I on the large, interdisciplinary UKRI/AHRC project Living with Machines based at the Turing Institute and British Library which seeks to transform our ability to study the history of modern Britain at scale.

Recent publications include Bias and representativeness in digitized newspaper collections: Introducing the environmental scan Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 38:1 (2023) 1-22, with K. Beelen, et al.; Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-war England (Oxford University Press 2019);  ‘Inventing the “traditional working class”: a re-analysis of interview notes from Young and Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London‘ The Historical Journal 59:2 (2016) 567-593.

Mathieu Fulla is a Faculty member at the Center for History at Sciences Po. His main research areas are the history of the European Left in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the history of the state, and the history of capitalism and its “financialization” from the 1970s onwards.

OrcID: 0000-0002-2281-1168

Recent publications include ‘The Neoliberal Turn that Never Was: Breaking with the Standard Narrative of Mitterrand’s tournant de la rigueur’ Contemporary European history 33 (2024) 763-784; European socialists and the state in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2020) edited with M. Lazar. He is also co-editor of the French journal Parlement(s). Revue d’histoire politique.

Supervision areas: neoliberalism, history of the Left in Western Europe (20th and 21st centuries), post-1970 history of capitalism, politics and economic expertise.