Olivier Burtin

I am a historian of the modern United States at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France, where I started as an Associate Professor (maître de conférences) in 2022. My research and teaching has revolved around three main themes: state and society, war and peace, and the U.S. in the world.

I began work in the first of these areas during my master’s degree at Sciences Po in France. I wrote my thesis about the life and work of Connecticut businesswoman Vivien Kellems (1896-1975), who led a remarkable career at the crossroads of tax resistance, feminism, and conservatism. It was later published as an article.

This first theme merged with the second, war and peace, during my doctoral work at Princeton University. In my dissertation, I explored the role played by veterans’ groups in the growth of social policy in the early- to mid-twentieth century United States. I later joined the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2018-2021 as an Incoming Research Fellow, which allowed me to spend one semester at Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute to complete my research. This project led to my first book, A Nation of Veterans: War, Citizenship, and the Welfare State in Modern America, which was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2022 (more on this in the “Book” page).

These three themes have all come together in my current book project, where I explore the place of the far right in U.S. history and historiography from a long-term and global perspective. I published an early version of this work as an article in 2021.

As a teacher, I have had the chance to teach a variety of classes related to these same three themes, on topics ranging from war and society, the history of U.S. foreign relations, the United States and Latin America, racial inequality in U.S. history, and U.S. capitalism. I delivered these courses in Germany, France, and the United States, in both online and in-person formats.