Professor Simon Burrows

I am a historian of the enlightenment, French revolution and Napoleonic era, specialising in France, Britain and Europe. Born in Britain, I have had an international career spanning Britain, Australia and New Zealand and visiting professorships in the Netherlands and Germany. In 2013 I moved to Western Sydney University as Professor of History (by Invitation) and since 2016 have been Professor of Digital Humanities also, following my appointment as head of the Digital Humanities Research Group.

My research revolves primarily around the history of print culture, books and journalism in France, Britain and Europe in the later enlightenment and French revolutionary era. My early work focused on the journalism of French exiles and emigres during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Thereafter I studied French exile writers in London before the revolutionary, particularly those involved in the dangerous business of writing scandalous works against the French monarchy. This work received global media attention and is featured (still) on the website of "Australians for Constitutional Monarchy". However, I am best known for path-breaking digital work on the French book trade in enlightenment Europe, which has been awarded funding on several occasions, involved dozens of students and researchers, and in 2017 won the prestigious BSECS Digital Resource prize. Through my digital work, and the challenges of keeping it online and data preservation, I have become increasingly interested in digital methodology, digital humainities pedagogy, and the problems common to all those working in digital humanities. Out of this interest, in 2022 I organised a global online conference on Building Digital Humanities, the first conference devoted entirely to tackling these issues.

I welcome students wishing to research French and British history (c.1750-1850); the history of the book and of newspapers and journalism; and digital humanities projects or methodologies; comparative histories. Due to my extensive experience (I have supervised around 200 Honours, Masters and PhD theses across my career) and my methodological and comparative focus, I have also co-supervised theses in areas as diverse as Australian and New Zealand cultural history, French literature, and South Asian international relations. 

From 1989-1992 I taught British undergraduates at the University of Oxford and American students at the Oxford University-affiliated Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In 1993, I moved to New Zealand to take up a lectureship in history at the University of Waikato, before returning to the UK in 2000 for a position at the University of Leeds, where I was successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer (2002) and Professor of Modern European History (2007-2012).