Robert Priest

I joined Royal Holloway in 2014 after studying at UCL and Oxford and a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. I co-organise the Modern French History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research and am part of the History Workshop Journal Editorial Collective. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Higher Education Academy.

I research the cultural and intellectual history of nineteenth-century Europe. My new book, Oberammergau: The Passion Play and Its Audiences from the Enlightenment to the Nazis, explores the impact of the enormous successful passion play at Oberammergau on people, culture, and ideas in Germany and the wider world across the modern period. My first book, The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France, offered a new interpretation of the remarkable controversy surrounding the publication of Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus (1863). Hardly read today, this attempt to write a historical biography of Jesus was one of the best-selling and most controversial books of its time.

My research generally tries to contribute to one or more of the following three areas:

1. Culture wars over religion. My research on Ernest Renan tried to unpick the stereotype of a conflict between secular republicans and devout Catholics in nineteenth-century France, while my work on Oberammergau argues that its appeal to a religiously mixed audience calls into question narratives of confessional conflict in Germany and beyond. My study of Jules Soury's attempt to diagnose Jesus with dementia tried to outline some of the limits to a ‘scientific’ approach to religion in the late nineteenth century.
   
   
2. The popular reception of ideas. How do people make sense of the ideas and images they consume? My research on Renan used an eclectic range of documents to explore how both ordinary people and intellectuals read his radical retelling of Jesus’s life, while my work on Oberammergau has used a wide range of international sources to explore how diverse audiences deployed their experiences at the passion play in wider debates. I am also interested the cultural reception of scientific ideas. A recent article traced the lives and afterlives two boys from rural France who were the first people to be successfully vaccinated against rabies by Louis Pasteur in 1885.
   
   
3. Race and antisemitism. Each of my major projects has treated phenomena understood to have contributed to modern antisemitism: Renan help popularise the Aryan-Semite distinction, while the Oberammergau passion play became intensely controversial for its representation of the first-century Jews. In each case I have tried to push beyond assertions of influence and instead trace precisely how people understood and rearticulated what they read and saw. Shorter treatments of these issues include an essay on the long debate over Renan’s racial thinking and an article on an American rabbi who was the first major critic of Oberammergau’s antisemitism.

I am responsible for various specialist options on European history and also contribute to a variety of team-taught courses in the department. In recent years I have convened the following specialist undergraduate options:

• The Death of God, from Enlightenment to Psychoanalysis
• Europe 1900: Cultures of Conflict and the Shock of the New
• Children of the Revolution? France from 1789 to the Great War
• The Shock of the New: European Culture and Society, 1789-1905

I sometimes also co-teach a third-year 'Concepts' seminar on 'Revolutions'. I have also taught thematic modules on French intellectuals and historiographical workshops on the historians Alain Corbin and Joan W. Scott.

PhD Supervision

I welcome correspondence from applicants looking to pursue doctoral study in modern European cultural and intellectual history, especially (but not exclusively) those working on the long nineteenth century and dealing with French or German sources.

My past research students include:

• Dr Samuel Bartlett, 'Renegade in an Imperial Age: Muḥammad Marmaduke Pickthall’s Islamic Scholarship and Politics in India Recentred (1920-1935)' (with Prof Francis Robinson).
• Dr Anthony Chapman-Joy, 'Representations of Difference in the Caricatures of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune' (with Sophie Defrance and Theresa Vernon, British Library); an important article from this project is forthcoming in German History.
• Dr Gareth Oakland, 'Resisting the Republic: The Politics of Commemoration in the Vendée, 1870-1918'; he published part of this research in French History.