Room: 772, Main Building
Phone: 0121 204 4808

Email: [email protected]
Office hours: Wednesdays and Thursdays, 9:00–11:00am, and by appointment. Please use WASS or email to book appointments.

Volker joined Aston as a Lecturer in Modern History in 2018. Before this, he was Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Melbourne (2015–17) and a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Tübingen (2013–15). He obtained his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence in 2013.

Volker’s main fields of interest include the history of nationalism and borders in Europe, ethnic violence, and humanitarian politics in the twentieth century. His first monograph, 'The Politics of Self-determination: Remaking Territories and National Identities in Europe, 1917-1923', was published with Oxford University Press in 2016.

Currently, Volker is working on a project on Foreign Intervention in the Cold War, which focuses on two case studies: the Congo Crisis in the early 1960s and the Indo-Pakistani conflict in 1947-48 and again in 1971. The project seeks to explore the conflicted rise of transnational politics before the ‘boom’ of foreign interventions since the 1990s.

• LQ1006 Contemporary Britain: From the Boer War to Brexit
• LQ2009 Humanitarian Action and Foreign Intervention, from 1915 - Today

History Programme Director

• PhD in History and Civilization, European University Institute, Florence (2013)
• MA in Modern History, Sociology, and German literature, Humboldt-University and Free University, Berlin (2009)

• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
• Member of BISA (The British International Studies Association)
• Member of the New Diplomatic History Network (https://newdiplomatichistory.org/)