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 Modern History. 

Research interests

I am a historian of twentieth-century political and intellectual life, with a strong focus on Britain and Europe.

My current research agenda is twofold. First, I am currently working towards my first monograph (forthcoming in 2026), based on my doctoral research on the political commitment of Eric Hobsbawm. My forthcoming book, based on my thesis, The Crises of Eric Hobsbawm: From Primitive Rebels to the End of Communism, uses Hobsbawm’s life and work to think through the history of twentieth-century global Communism, and British Communism, and its global crises (1956, 1968, 1989), as well as reflect on the nature of British politics and place them within a broader narrative of intellectual and political engagement in the twentieth century.

My new project, provisionally titled A Century of Brutalisation: State Construction, Police Coercion, and the Making of Modern Western Europe (1870–1962) investigates how coercive practices—including police surveillance, paramilitary control, and imperial counterinsurgency—became foundational to modern statecraft in Western Europe and its empires. Focusing on five key states—Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal—it will trace how colonial and domestic policing strategies were co-constructed, exported, and re-imported across national and imperial spaces.

Qualifications

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

Professional memberships

• Royal Historical Society

Student education