Dr Charlie Hall

Dr Charlie Hall graduated from the University of Kent in 2012 with a BA in History, which he immediately followed up with an MA (Research) in Modern History, also at Kent. In January 2017 he completed his PhD within the School of History, with a thesis on the British exploitation of science and technology in occupied Germany after the Second World War.

He is now Lecturer in Modern European History, with a particular focus on Germany and Britain in the twentieth century.

Charlie’s first book, British Exploration of German Science and Technology, 1943-1949 (Routledge, 2019), explores how Britain made use of Nazi Equipment and expertise after the Second World War, and the wider ramifications which this had. In this connection, he has also written about the British control of German science during the post-war occupation, the competition between Britain and the Soviet Union for the 'scientific spoils of war' and the British use of German expertise to build a ballistic missile arsenal after 1945.

With receipt of funding from the Smithsonian Institution to fund research at the National Air and Space museum in Washington, DC, he also produced an article on British responses to the V-2 missile bombardment during the Second World War.

His current research concerns perceptions of Nazism in Britain, from 1920-1950. This examines responses from all sectors of British life, from the diaries of the King to graffiti scrawled on the walls of East London pub toilets. It encompasses the perspectives of the most fervent opponents of Nazism as well as those who saw merits in this ideology and sought to import a version of it into Britain. This research has received funding through the BA/Leverhulme Small Grant Scheme and will be the subject of his next monograph.

Looking ahead, he is also interested in the legacies of Nazism in Britain, since 1950. How has our utter fixation with this particular regime shaped our ow political discourse and culture, and what does it tell us about popular memory in Britain?

Elsewhere, he has written about British civil defence spending during the Second World War and Cold War, the impact of technology on our cultural perceptions of violence, and the way memories of the Second World War offered a lens to navigate the Covid-19 pandemic.

HIST4000: Controversial Histories

HIST5209: Europe in Extremes: Communism, Fascism and Nazism, 1917-1939

HIST6117: The Eternal Nazi: Global Legacies of the Third Reich

Broadly speaking, Charlie is open to supervising projects on:

• Twentieth-century European dictatorships, especially in their international contexts.
• Memory and myth-making, relating to dictatorship and warfare
• Cultural histories of technology, conflict and violence
• Propaganda in the modern age

Charlie is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy.

He has acted as a peer reviewer for a number of academic journals, including Modern British History, The International History Review, Journal of British Studies. The London Journal, British Journal of Military History and History Australia.

He has made a number of appearances in TV documentaries, on the radio and on podcasts, and has written for magazines such as History of War and websites such as The War Zone