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Dr Daniel A. Gordon
Expert in the history of contemporary France
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historian of modern and contemporary France & Europe, 1930s to the present
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author of Immigrants and Intellectuals: May '68 & the rise of Anti-Racism in France
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specialist in hidden histories of inequalities and grassroots activism
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fluent French speaker, available for media enquiries & translation work
About Daniel
Dr Daniel A. Gordon is an Associate Member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, with over 25 years' experience of working in higher education, in France and in the UK, particularly in the post-1992 sector.
He is an enthusiastic advocate for French studies and has many years’ experience of giving talks to students in schools and colleges across the North West of England.
He is co-host of the podcast French Talk launched in 2024, bringing together schoolteachers and experts on contemporary France to produce a series of episodes about teaching French and understanding French society and history.
Expert in modern French and European history
Spending regular periods of time researching in France is central to all his writing, and he is often invited to speak at universities and festivals across France. He has taught a wide range of topics in modern European history at all levels from access course to doctoral supervision, and is noted for his lively presentation style.
A former senior lecturer at Edge Hill University, he is also an experienced French-to-English translator, including for the OUP journal French History.
Promoter of hidden voices
Daniel seeks to highlight hidden voices and everyday actions carried out by individuals and groups in opposition to dominant power structures around them.
For several years he served on the advisory board of an oral history project at Génériques, a Paris-based organisation of primarily lived experience anti-racism campaigners, whose activities included the curation of exhibitions and the creation of an archive of firsthand experiences of migration activism in France.
Since 2021 Daniel has been part of the organising collective of a research seminar series on social movement history at Sciences-Po Paris.
Public speaker
A former Entente Cordiale Scholar, Daniel was invited in summer 2025 to speak at the French Institute in London as an example of ‘Talents to Change the World: Alumni at the Heart of Scientific Cooperation’. He was invited by the Mayor of Paris to the opening of the Square Saint-Bernard-Saïd-Bouziri, and was recently invited to speak at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna.
Writer
Currently, Daniel is writing a new history of political controversies around public transport in postwar France, including the forgotten history of local and international experiments in free public transport since the 1970s. He is also working on a microhistory of the Paris anti-fascist riot of 21 June 1973, as part of a collaborative research project based at Edinburgh University.
Actor and advisor
Daniel enjoys acting and has performed at the Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool; Storyhouse, Chester; Chester Mystery Plays; and Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre, where he was consulted about his research on the gilets jaunes for a Brexit-themed professional production of Henry V.
Publications
Daniel’s publications include articles in French and English for academic and non-academic audiences, and he has been interviewed by media in France, Switzerland and Colombia as well as the UK, where his pieces are the most read posts in the ten year history of the French History Network blog.
His first book Immigrants and Intellectuals is a classic, used at universities around the world, including Georgetown University in Washington DC, in teaching the history of 1968 protest movements. It also enjoys a general readership amongst the wider public, and is in its second printing.
Reviews of Daniel's work
"Whilst being well written and impressively researched, Gordon’s notable talent as an historian breathes life into this period and illuminates a perspective of May ’68 that is rarely acknowledged. He does well to show the sense of optimism and the legacy that endured well beyond the strikes themselves, and masterfully dispels the myth that May ’68 was a purely French affair. With frequent references to figures such as Sartre, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Debray, de Gaulle, Jospin, and Mitterrand, in addition to less well-known figures such as Djellali Ben Ali and Saïd Bouziri, Gordon also provides a cast of ‘characters’ that Tolkien would have been proud of."
French History
"A contribution of the first order to the historiography of the '68 years ... Enters immigration into the history of 68, and 68 into the history of immigration."
Vingtième Siècle