Professor of History
Matthew G. Stanard is Professor of History at Berry and President of the French Colonial Historical Society. He is a historian of modern Europe with an emphasis on Europe's relations with the wider world, in particular European overseas empire building and decolonization. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is Decolonising Europe? Popular Responses to the End of Empire (with Berny Sèbe, 2020).
Education
- B.A., Wake Forest University
- M.A., Ph.D., Indiana University-Bloomington
Teaching Interests
- Modern European History
- Africa since 1800
- World History
- Imperialism, Colonialism and Nationalism
Research Interests
Dr. Stanard has published a number of essays on European overseas imperialism, comparative empires, Belgian colonialism in the Congo, and colonial culture in Europe. His published work has been translated into French, English, Italian, and Dutch. He has been a Wolfsonian Fellow at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami Beach, Florida, a Belgian American Educational Foundation Fellow in Brussels, a Chancellor's Fellow at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and a participant in the National History Center's Decolonization Seminar in Washington, D.C. He has lived in or traveled to Europe regularly since the early 1980s. He is at work on two books, the first a one-volume history of Belgian colonialism, the other a global history of the island of Majorca.
Field Experience
Listen to Dr. Stanard's interview on imperialism in Africa with 'Then Again,' a podcast by the Northeast Georgia History Center.
Listen to Dr. Stanard's interview for 'This Week in History: The Congo Free State' for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation program Nightlife.
Selected Publications
- Dr. Stanard's Book, Selling the Congo, is now out in paperback with University of Nebraska Press.
- Dr. Stanard's European Overseas Imperialism, 1879-1999: A Short History, has been published by Wiley.
- Dr. Stanard's The Leopard, the Lion, and the Cock: Colonial Memories and Monuments in Belgium, has been published by Leuven University Press. (Distributed by Cornell Univ. Press in U.S.)
- Stanard’s latest book is Decolonising Europe? Popular Responses to the End of Empire, co-edited with Berny Sèbe of the University of Birmingham (U.K.). Decolonising Europe? offers a new paradigm to understand decolonisation in Europe by showing how it was fundamentally a fluid process of fluxes and refluxes involving not only transfers of populations, ideas and socio-cultural practices across continents but also complex intra-European dynamics at a time of political convergence following the Treaty of Rome.
- View Dr. Stanard's author page on Amazon.com.