Richard Charles Vinen (born 1963) is a British historian and academic who holds a professorship at King's College London. Vinen is a specialist in 20th-century European history, particularly of Britain and France. [1]
Born in 1963 [2] in Birmingham, Vinen grew up on the Bournville Estate. [3] His father, Joe Vinen, was a professor of physics. [3] [4] [5] From 1982 to 1989, Richard Vinen attended Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1985, and then completing his doctoral studies there; [6] [7] his PhD was awarded in 1989 for his thesis "The politics of French Business 1936–1945", [8] supervised by Christopher Andrew. [9]
Vinen was a Fellow at Trinity from 1988 to 1992, and was a part-time lecturer at Queen Mary University of London from 1988 to 1991. [7] He eventually moved to London where he and his wife lived in a succession of louche locations early in his career. He has written that "the Serious Crime Squad once installed a camera in our bedroom so that they could keep an eye on one of our neighbours." [3] After lecturing at Queen Mary, he joined King's College London in 1991 as a lecturer; he was promoted to a readership in 2001, and was appointed Professor of History in 2007. [6] [7]
Vinen's book National Service: Conscription in Britain, 1945–1963 (2014) received generally positive reviews. [10] [11] On 13 May 2015, he was presented with a Wolfson History Prize and Templer Medal for it. [12] He also won the Walter Laqueur Prize in 2012 (recognising the best article in Journal of Contemporary History of the previous year) for "The Poisoned Madeleine: The Autobiographical Turn in Historical Writing". [7] [13] In 2018, Vinen delivered the Institute of Historical Research's Creighton Lecture on the topic "When was Thatcherism?". [14] In 2020, he was one of three historians invited to give the Historical Research Lecture; it was entitled "Writing histories of 2020". [15]
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