Brendan Simms is the founder and Director of the Centre for Geopolitics. He works on European geopolitics, past and present, and his principal interests are the German Question, Britain and Europe, Hitler’s global anti-semitism, Humanitarian Intervention and state construction.
He teaches at both undergraduate and graduate level in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS); he also supervises history undergraduates at Peterhouse, Cambridge. His MPhil courses on the History of European Geopolitics use scenarios as part of the teaching and learning process. He has supervised PhD dissertations on subjects as diverse as Intervention and State Sovereignty in the Holy Roman Empire, Sinn Fein, the American colonists and the eighteenth-century European state system, the Office of the UN High Representative in Bosnia, and German Civil-Military relations. Professor Simms is a frequent contributor to print and broadsheet media.
He has advised governments and parliaments, and spoken at Westminster, in the European Parliament (Brussels) and at think-tanks in the United Kingdom, the United States and in many Eurozone countries. The Centre for Geopolitics is designed to draw together all these interests.
Key publications:
Brendan Simms and D.J. Trim (eds), Humanitarian intervention. A history (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Towards a Westphalia for the Middle East (with Patrick Milton and Michael Axworthy) (Hurst Publishers, London, 2018)
Hitler. Only the world was enough (Allen Lane, London, 2019)
Unfinest hour. Britain and the destruction of Bosnia (Allen Lane, London, 2001)
Three Victories and a defeat: the rise and fall of the first British Empire (Allen Lane, London, 2007)
Europe. The struggle for supremacy, 1453 to the present (Allen Lane, London, 2013)
Britain’s Europe. A thousand years of conflict and cooperation (Allen Lane, London, 2016)
Donald Trump. The making of a world view (with Charlie Laderman) (IB Tauris, London, 2017)
