Helen Graham (historian)

Helen Graham (born 1959) is a British historian. She is Professor Emeritus of Modern European History at the Department of History, Royal Holloway University of London. She co-wrote a standard reference work on Spanish cultural studies with Jo Lebanyi, and her introduction to the Spanish Civil War sold more than fifty thousand copies and was translated into five other languages.

Life

Helen Graham was born in Liverpool in 1959.{{Cite web |date=2010-03-06 |title=The War Before the Lights Went Out: An Interview with Helen Graham |url=https://albavolunteer.org/2010/03/the-war-before-the-lights-went-out-an-interview-with-helen-graham/ |access-date=2025-04-23 |website=The Volunteer |language=en-US}} She earned a DPhil at Oxford. She has worked at the University of Southampton, New York University and most recently Royal Holloway University of London, where she is Professor Emeritus of Modern European History in the Department of History.{{Cite web |title=ProfessorHelen Graham - Research - Royal Holloway, University of London |url=https://pure.rhul.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/helen-graham_8fc507aa-5638-40be-ada7-b3865d4689b5.html |archive-url=http://web.archive.org/web/20141220123251/http://pure.rhul.ac.uk:80/portal/en/persons/helen-graham_8fc507aa-5638-40be-ada7-b3865d4689b5.html |archive-date=2014-12-20 |access-date=2025-04-23 |website=pure.rhul.ac.uk |language=en}}

Her research interests span the social and cultural history of 1930s and 1940s Spain, including the Spanish Civil War; Europe in the inter-war period (1918–1939); comparative civil wars; the social construction of state power in 1940s Spain; women under Francoism; comparative gender history. In 2017 she was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship to research Franco’s prisons between 1936 and 1976.{{Cite web |title=Major Research Fellowships 2017 |url=https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/major-research-fellowships-2017 |access-date=24 April 2025 |website=Leverhulme Trust}}

Graham has work has been published widely, including in the Guardian, Independent on Sunday, History Today, BBC History, Literary Review and the London Review of Books.{{Cite web |title=Helen Graham Profile |url=https://cvtrc.org/about/research-fellows/helen-graham-profile/ |archive-url=http://web.archive.org/web/20241207141520/http://cvtrc.org/about/research-fellows/helen-graham-profile/ |archive-date=2024-12-07 |access-date=2025-04-23 |website=Conflict, Violence, and Terrorism Research Centre |language=en-GB}} She has written a number of books, including Spanish Cultural Studies with Jo Labanyi, published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in 1995, which became the standard reference work. The 2005 OUP The Spanish Civil War. A Very Short Introduction sold more than 50,000 copies and was translated into Spanish, German, Portuguese, Greek and Turkish.