Timothy Charles William Blanning, FBA is a historian and retired academic. Between 1992 and 2009, he was Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge.
Career
Timothy Charles William Blanning was born on 21 April 1942. After attending the King's School in Bruton, he went up to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree and then continuing to complete his doctorate there; his PhD was awarded in 1967. In 1965, he was elected to a research fellowship at Sidney Sussex, and in 1968 was elected to a fellowship there. In the meantime, he was appointed to an assistant lectureship at the University of Cambridge in 1972, being promoted to lecturer four years later. He was promoted again to be Reader in Modern European History in 1987, and was appointed Professor of Modern European History in 1992. He retired in 2009, but remains at Cambridge as an emeritus professor.
Research
Blanning's first book, Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 1743–1803, offered a case study which could examine the German Problem, the idea that modern Germany began moving apart from Western Europe in political and cultural terms; Blanning sought to demonstrate that this process began in the eighteenth century, whereas earlier historians had emphasised the nineteenth century as a more important period. His second book, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792–1802, was published in 1983, and the French Revolution was also the subject of Blanning's The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, The French Revolution: Aristocrats versus Bourgeois? and The French Revolutionary Wars. In the meantime, he turned to the Habsburg monarchy and produced a biography of the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II in 1994; he has also published biographies of George I and Frederick the Great of Prussia, the latter of which won the British Academy Medal in 2016. Since the early 2000s, Blanning's work has also focused on cultural histories of Europe, beginning in 2002 with his book The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture; this was followed by The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815, The Triumph of Music: Composers, Musicians and Audiences, 1700 to the Present and The Romantic Revolution.
