Gordon Pentland

I was educated at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh and worked from 2006 at the University of Edinburgh, where I was Professor of Political History, until moving to Monash University in 2022. 

­­­­My principal interest is the political history of Britain since the eighteenth century. My first two monographs provided a comprehensive analysis of two periods of dramatic political crisis and change in the nineteenth century and I have published work dealing with politics in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Part of my work has involved thinking seriously about how political historians can engage with material culture and my research draws on political prints and images, monuments, flags and banners. I have additional interests in the French Revolution, Australian history, and how different constituencies responded and reacted to assassinations and assassination attempts in the British world. My current project aims to produce the first substantially new history of the ‘Reform Crisis’ (1828-1832) in over 50 years, focusing on experiences of crisis and adopting four nations and British world perspectives.