Iker Itoiz Ciaurriz

Profile

After receiving a BA (Hons) in History and Politicis (2014) and then an MA in Modern History (2015) from the Complutense University of Madrid, I moved to the University of Edinburgh to begin work on my PhD. under the supervision of Professor Emile Chabal. Having held a temporary teaching fellow in Modern European History at Durham University, I joined the University of Leeds in August 2024 as Teaching Fellow in International History.

Research interests

I am a historian of modern Europe, specialising in the intellectual and political history of the twentieth century. My research examines the relationship between political ideas and political practice, with particular interests in communism, political violence, antifascism, revolution, nationalism, decolonisation, and the Cold War. Across my work, I am interested in how periods of political and ideological crisis transform the ways in which people understand politics: how concepts such as revolution, resistance, violence, nationalism, and political legitimacy acquire new meanings through political conflict and through encounters across national and imperial boundaries.

My first major research project explores these questions through the life and work of the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. My forthcoming monograph, The Crises of Eric Hobsbawm: From Primitive Rebels to the Collapse of Communism (Bloomsbury), examines the relationship between Hobsbawm’s historical writing and his lifelong political commitment. Rather than approaching Hobsbawm solely as a historian or intellectual, the book places his ideas within the political networks, movements, and crises through which they developed. Organised around the crises of 1956, 1968, and 1989, it examines his responses to the crisis of international communism, Eurocommunism, revolutionary politics in Latin America, nationalism, transformations of the British left, and the eventual collapse of European communism.

This research has led me towards a broader interest in how political knowledge is produced through encounters between intellectuals, activists, political movements, and states. My work therefore approaches intellectual history transnationally and seeks to move beyond conventional intellectual canons by examining political movements themselves as producers of ideas.

My current project, Between Barbarism and Liberation: The Violent Making of the Cold War, 1936–1962, develops this approach through a transnational history of political violence. Beginning with the Spanish Civil War and ending with Algerian independence, the project examines how experiences of civil war, fascism, occupation, resistance, revolution, colonial warfare, and decolonisation transformed understandings of legitimate and illegitimate violence. In particular, I am interested in the changing meanings of categories such as ‘resistance’, ‘terrorism’, ‘revolution’, ‘banditry’, ‘liberation’, and ‘barbarism’, and in the political struggles over who possessed the authority to define particular forms of violence as legitimate.

Qualifications

• PhD in History
• MA in Modern History
• BA (Hons) History
• BA (Hons) Political Science

Professional memberships

• Royal Historical Society

Student education

I convene and contribute to research-led teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level across modern European, British, international, and Latin American history. My teaching is closely connected to my research interests in political and intellectual history, political violence, communism and the Left, revolution and protest, decolonisation, nationalism, and the Cold War. Across these areas, I encourage students to approach modern history transnationally and to consider how events and ideas conventionally studied within national histories were shaped by wider European, imperial, and global connections.

My teaching places Europe within wider global and imperial histories. In modules on post-war Europe, the Cold War, and Latin America, students examine connections between European political developments, decolonisation, revolutionary movements, dictatorship, human rights, and political mobilisation across the wider world. This approach encourages students to question conventional geographical and chronological boundaries, for example, by considering connections between European resistance and anticolonial struggles, or between Latin American revolutionary politics and debates within the European Left.

More broadly, I teach the history of war, violence, and their aftermath from the First World War through the Cold War. My teaching explores how global conflict affected combatants and civilians, how societies experienced occupation, displacement, and political violence, and how war reshaped states, empires, borders, and political identities. I am particularly interested in encouraging students to examine the experiences of historical actors who can disappear from conventional political narratives, including refugees, colonial subjects, women, activists, resistance fighters, and other marginalised groups.

Ultimately, I aim to encourage students to see history not as a collection of self-contained national narratives, but as a field of connections, encounters, and contested interpretations. Whether studying the First World War, post-war Europe, the Global Cold War, modern Britain, or Latin America, students are encouraged to ask how local experiences interacted with wider transnational processes and how different historical actors understood and sought to transform the worlds in which they lived.