Department of History

Holger Hoock

  • Amundson Chair of British History [On Sabbatical 2022/23]

Fields

Britain and the British Empire, 18th and 19th c.
Cultural History
Cultural history of warfare and violence 
Memory and Commemoration
Histories of Visual Culture, Collecting, and Archaeology

Teaching

Massacres: The Culture of War and Culture Wars in Colonial and Revolutionary America
Society and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England
History Honors Seminar (Research & Writing)
Empires in World History
Graduate Writing Seminar
British Empire

Professor Hoock is happy to hear from prospective graduate students with interests in British and British imperial history, especially in the period c.1700–1850

Education & Training

  • DPhil, University of Oxford, 2001
  • MA, University of Freiburg, 1997

Representative Publications

Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (New York: Crown/Penguin Random House, 2017). 

Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850 (London: Profile Books, 2010); xxx + 514 pp.

The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760-1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003; paperback 2005); xviii + 368 pp.

“America’s Violent Birth: The Founding Fathers Were No Strangers to Extreme Polarization, Political Violence, and Intimidation of the Press”, Salon (July 4, 2017)

“Mangled Bodies: Atrocity in the American Revolutionary War,” Past & Present 230:1 (2016), 123–59.

“Rape, ius in bello, and the British Army in the American Revolutionary War,” Journal of Military Ethics, 14:1 (2015), 74–97.

“Struggling Against a Vulgar Prejudice”: Patriotism and The Collecting of British Art at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century, Journal of British Studies, 49:3 (2010), 566–91.

"The British State and the Anglo-French Wars Over Antiquities, 1798-1858,” Historical Journal, 50:1 (2007), 1–24.

Research Interests

Discords of Memory: Justice in the Monumental Landscapes of the American Revolution, 1775-2025

Memory of atrocities