Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics
Raised Faculty Building
University of Cambridge
Sidgwick Avenue
Cambridge
CB3 9DA
United Kingdom
Darren graduated from University College Dublin with a Bachelor’s degree in History and Politics, and a Master’s degree in the History of International Relations. He received his PhD from Cambridge University, working under Sir Richard Evans, and has held visiting fellowships at Berlin’s Humboldt University, Berlin’s Technical University, and the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.
German History
Modern European History
Government and Administration in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Politics and Ideology
German Occupation Policy in World War 2
Genocide and Mass Violence
Darren is working on his first book, an interdisciplinary study of the civil service in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Using models from political science and organisational sociology, the book argues that the administration functioned similarly under both democracy and dictatorship, and that the factors informing civil servants’ readiness to implement ambitious social policies after World War I and policies of genocide during World War II were often similar. As such, it provides an alternative interpretation to those emphasising ideology as a determinant of civil servants’ actions. Alongside this, he is working on German occupation policy in World War II, and on sports and sports journalism.
Forthcoming with Christopher Young, Willy Meisl – ‘King of the Sports Journalists’. A Jewish Career in Time of Change (Boston and Berlin: DeGruyter, 2023).
Forthcoming, ‘“Self-Coordination” and its Origins. Civil Servants and Regime Change in 1933 and 1918/19’, Contemporary European History, Spring 2022
Forthcoming with Christopher Young ‘The Will of the Führer?’ Financing Construction for the 1936 Olympics, Journal of Contemporary History, Summer 2022.
‘The Nazis Enter History’, History Today vol. 71, no. 8 (August 2021).
‘Perpetrators? Political civil servants in the Third Reich’, in Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence: Action, Motivations and Dynamics, eds. Timothy Williams and Susanne Buckley-Zistel (London and New York, 2018).
