S1E9 Alexander Watson - Goldsmiths, University of London

Today's guest is Alexander Watson. Alex is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a renowned scholar of the First World War and modern Germany. He was educated at Oxford University and finished his Ph.D. there in 2005 under the direction of Niall Ferguson. Watson was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge from 2008-2011 and then spent two years in Poland at Warsaw University as a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow. His first book, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918, was published with Cambridge in 2008 and won the Institute of Contemporary History and Wiener Library's Fraenkel Prize. 

That was just the beginning of his time in the spotlight. His second book, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, was published by Allen Lane/Basic Books (2014) and went on to win the Wolfson History Prize, The Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, The Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Award, and the British Army Military Book of the Year Award.

His most recent book, The Fortress: The Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands, was also published by Allen Lane/Basic Books (2019). That book was a finalist in all of the competitions mentioned above, and it secured Watson's second Distinguished Book Award from The Society for Military History. Alex is now working on a political and sensory history of the July 1932 election in Weimar Germany. Over half of the electorate chose radical, anti-system parties of the far left and far right, effectively voting Germany's first, fragile democracy out of existence. In this watershed election, the book explores the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and even touch to better understand this violent and emotional time when the Nazis became the political power in Germany and took a decisive step on the road to establishing the Third Reich. Watch Babylon Berlin on Netflix - you'll get a sense of it.

Watson has published more than 17 additional articles and essays, and he appears on radio, television, and podcasts, and now he's slumming with us on Military Historians are People, Too!. It is no exaggeration to say that Alex is a star in the field of military history, and we are thrilled to have him on the show. 

Rec. 12/09/2021