Daniel is a historian of modern and contemporary Europe, with a particular interest in movements and organisations whose activities transcended national boundaries. In this context, he has worked on the causes promoted by socialists, anarchists, pacifists, humanitarians, student activists and anti-racist campaigners.
Daniel joined 51 in 2009, having previously worked as a Teaching Fellow at University College London (UCL). At Northumbria, he has been Erasmus coordinator (2010–2015), Programme Leader for BA programmes (2013–2016), Head of History (2017–2019, 2021), Director of Education for Humanities (2020–2022) and Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange for History (2023–2025).
Daniel's teaching covers a wide range in modern and contemporary history, including the option modules 'Into the Dark Valley: Europe, 1919–1939', 'Where Have All the Good Times Gone: Crisis and Change in Western Europe, 1965–1987', 'Peace, Love and Understanding: International Political Activism in the 19thand 20thCenturies' and 'From the Campus to the Streets: Student Activism and Youth Movements since 1900' . He also convenes the MA module 'War and Peace in Historical Perspective'. Daniel's teaching has been recognised via a Provost's Teaching Award at UCL (2009), a Distinguished Teaching Fellowship at Northumbria (2022) and through accolades in the teaching awards run by 51 Students' Union ('Best Lecturer' award in 2013; 'Committee Highly Commended' award in 2016). He has supervised 7 PhD theses to completion and is the principal supervisor of a Collaborative Doctoral Award project in cooperation with the National Union of Students.
Daniel has led a variety of projects (with funding from the AHRC, ESRC, the British Educational Research Association, the Society for Educational Studies as well as a range of international councils), maintaining collaborations with historians in Belgium, Britain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the US. He is currently the editor-in-chief of History: The Journal of the Historical Association.
Daniel's research deals with transnational movements and associations in 19th/20th-century Europe. He is particularly interested in competing conceptualisations of global order, the ways in which campaigners sought to effect change at the international level, and the relationship between nationalism and internationalism. Daniel has special expertise in the history of international organisations, covering the work of the League of Nations as well as the associations set up by activists. He has edited two volumes in this field, Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements between the World Wars (London, 2011) and, with Wouter Van Acker and Christophe Verbruggen, International Organizations and Global Civil Society: Histories of the Union of International Associations (London, 2019). Moreover, he is currently the Principal Investigator of an international research project in this area, entitled , which is run within the framework of the Transatlantic Platform for the Social Sciences and Humanities (with funding from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council, Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the U.S. National Science Foundation).
Daniel first monograph – The Age of Internationalism and Belgium, 1880–1930: Peace, Progress and Prestige – was published by Manchester University Press in 2013. The study examined European internationalism through the prism of congresses, conferences and campaigns that took place in Belgium. Moreover, in a range of articles, he has covered the efforts of pacifists, humanitarians, revolutionaries, student activists and intellectuals who construed their aims as transcending national categories. Much of this work informs his second monograph, (Bloomsbury, 2023). Daniel has also co-edited special journal issues on histories of humanitarianism (Journal of Modern European History, 2014), transnational solidarities (European Review of History, 2014), challenges to state socialism in the 1970s and 1980s (Labour History Review, 2021 and East Central Europe, 2023) and on the relationship between youth and internationalism (Social History, 2023). With project lead Jessica Reinisch and fellow co-leads Ria Kapoor and Margot Tudor, he is runnig a research network on 'Rethinking Internationalism: Histories and Pluralities', supported via an AHRC Curiosity Grant.
At present, Daniel is working on the history of student activism in the period from the interwar years to the early Cold War. Specific findings from this work feature in The English Historical Review (2017) and Social History (2023). His research in this field has generated funded research projects (run together with Georgina Brewis, UCL), collaborations with the National Union of Students (NUS) and the Workers' Educational Association (WEA) as well as two edited volumes that are under contract with Liverpool University Press. With Isabella Löhr (ZZF Potsdam / FU Berlin), he is running the project 'University Students as Migrants: A New History of Educational Mobility in Western Europe, 1960s–1980s', which is jointly funded by the AHRC and the German Research Foundation (DFG).
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