Biography
Professor of the History of European International Relations
Professor Simms is an expert on European geopolitics, past and present, and his principal interests are the German Question, Britain and Europe, Humanitarian Intervention and state construction. He teaches at both undergraduate and graduate level in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) and the Faculty of History. His MPhil course on the History European Geopolitics (co-taught with Dr Charlie Laderman) uses 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 colonist 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 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.
Publications
- Unfinest hour. Britain and the destruction of Bosnia (Allen Lane, London, 2001), 462pp (Bosnian and Serbian Edition: Nasramniji Trenutak. Britanija i unistavanje Bosne (Sarajevo and Belgrade, 2003). Shortlisted for the BBC's Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2002.
- Three Victories and a defeat: the rise and fall of the first British Empire (Allen Lane, London, 2007), pp. 781.
- Europe. The struggle for supremacy, 1453 to the present (Allen Lane, London, 2013), pp. 690. Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize; The longest afternoon. The 400 men who decided the battle of Waterloo (Allen Lane, London, 2014) pp. 126.
- Brendan Simms and D.J. Trim (eds), Humanitarian intervention. A history (Cambridge University Press, 2011).