Simon Quinn

Profile

I obtained my BA in History at the University of Stirling in 2011. During my undergraduate degree I developed an obsession with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and have studied the subject ever since. I remained at Stirling to acquire an MRes in Historical Research in 2012, before moving to the University of York to complete my PhD. After graduating in 2018, I held several teaching and research positions at York, before joining Leeds in 2022. 

I joined Leeds in 2022 as a teaching and research fellow. In addition to my teaching responbsibilities, I will be offering research assistance for Dr Kevin Linch’s Arts and Humanities Council Leadership Fellowship ‘Re-archiving the Individual: British Army Officers, 1790–1820’. 

Responsibilities

• Teaching Fellow in British History
• Post-doctoral research assistant for 'Re-archiving the individual: British Army Officers, 1790-1820'

Research interests

My research focuses on the social and cultural history of the British military during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I have a broad interest in the development of military culture, technology and tactics in Europe throughout the long nineteenth century. I am particularly interested in the use of war as a medium of cultural exchange. I explored this concept in my PhD and subsequent article (published in 2019).

I am hugely excited to be part of Dr Kevin Linch’s project ‘Re-archiving the Individual: British Army Officers, 1790–1820’ This project will develop the practice of digitally re- arranging archive records around named individuals, using British Army officer records from c.1790–1830 as a case study. The project involves creating a life archive through a process of digitisation and record linking that will be developed in collaboration with the Sheffield Digital Humanities Institute (Sheffield DHI) and the UK’s National Archive. These resources will then be used to explore the careers of Army officers, bridging themes of biography, social networks, agency, military effectiveness, and record keeping / state power in the period. 

In addition to this I am developing my own research project  that will consider British soldiers’ cultural encounters and experiences during a range of expeditions that took place during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It will assess, in a comparative framework, British soldiers’ encounters with people from disparate areas of the globe, from Russia to the Caribbean. This approach will offer an alternative mode of looking at British soldiers’ experiences. It will emphasize the significance of cultural encounters and perceptions of the ‘other’ in forging Britain’s military and imperial identity during a crucial expansionist phase of the British Empire. Recent scholarship on militarized cross-cultural encounters has focused heavily on the campaigns in the Iberian Peninsula (1808–1814), hence this timely study will globalise our understanding of cross-cultural encounters during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Any research projects I'm currently working on will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Qualifications

• PhD History
• MRes Historical Research
• BA (Hons) History

Professional memberships

• Fellow, Higher Education Academy

Student education

I teach on various aspects of British history at all levels of study, with a focus on the armed forces and society. As an advocate of research-led teaching, the modules I lead build on themes related to my research. These themes include: 

• the relationship bertween military and civilian spheres in British society 
• British history during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
• the history of Britain’s national and military identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 
• the changing nature and experience of warfare in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• engaging in archival practices

Related to this, I also supervise final year undergraduate projects.