Contact
Teaching Summary
In 2023/24, I will be convening my final year Special Subject Alternatives to War: Articulating Peace since 1815. In addition, I will be convening the second year option British Foreign Policy and… read more
Research Summary
My current research focuses on transnational networks of peace activists in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century. I am currently working on a monograph based on substantial… read more
Recent Publications
JULIE V. GOTTLIEB, DANIEL HUCKER and RICHARD TOYE, eds., 2021. The Munich Crisis and the people: International, transnational and comparative perspectives Manchester University Press.
HUCKER, D, 2021. Public opinion, policymakers, and the Munich Crisis: adding emotion to international history. In: JULIE V. GOTTLIEB, DANIEL HUCKER and RICHARD TOYE, eds., The Munich Crisis and the people: International, transnational and comparative perspectives Manchester University Press.
HUCKER, D, 2020. Public Opinion and Twentieth-Century Diplomacy: A Global Perspective Bloomsbury Academic.
In 2023/24, I will be convening my final year Special Subject Alternatives to War: Articulating Peace since 1815. In addition, I will be convening the second year option British Foreign Policy and the Origins of the World Wars, 1895-1939.
Current Research
My current research focuses on transnational networks of peace activists in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century. I am currently working on a monograph based on substantial archival research that has recently been undertaken in the UK, continental Europe and the United States (funded largely by a British Academy project entitled '"The public opinion of the world": transnational citizen activism and diplomacy, 1890-1920'). Analysing the activities of several transnational organisations, including the International Peace Bureau, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom, and The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, this monograph will consider how peace was articulated, the projected role that an increasingly enlightened and international 'public sphere' would play, and hence the overall influence of public opinion on international affairs during this frenetic and challenging period of modern history.
Past Research
My previous research (and this is by no means completely dormant!) explored the influence of public opinion on the foreign policies pursued by Britain and France in the late 1930s. This research uses a conceptual notion of 'representations' in order to explore how certain dominant tendencies of public opinion assumed greater potency than others, and thus had a greater impact on the policymaking elites. Differentiating between 'residual' and 'reactive' representations of opinion, it illustrates how elite perceptions of public opinion evolved in the crucial period between the Munich Agreement and the outbreak of war in September 1939. A monograph, entitled Public Opinion and the End of Appeasement in Britain and France, was published by Ashgate in February 2011. My focus on public opinion also underpins my most recent monograph, Public Opinion and Twentieth-Century Diplomacy (Bloomsbury, 2020), whilst my continued interest in the appeasement era of the 1930s is showcased in the book I've edited recently with Professor Julie V. Gottlieb (Sheffield) and Professor Richard Toye (Exeter), The Munich Crisis and the people: International, transnational and comparative perspectives (MUP, 2021).
I am interested in supervising PhDs in topics that broadly correlate with my research interests, both past and present.