My name is Dr Matt Broad.  A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, I’m an Assistant Professor (UD1) in History and International Studies in the Institute for History, Leiden University and an Associate Member of Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

While my teaching and research interests are varied, I work chiefly on British, and more broadly European, politics and political history from 1945 to the present day. My first book, Harold Wilson, Denmark and the Making of Labour European Policy was published in 2017.  This (1) compared the respective evolution of British and Nordic foreign policies, especially the European policies of their respective socialist parties, and (2) explored how important transnational contact between national actors was in shaping the external European policies of those parties and countries.

My current research – the beginnings of which took form with my EU-funded Horizon 2020 Marie Curie grant – is an institutional study of the British-inspired European Free Trade Association (EFTA) from the 1950s to the recent past which, despite being the principal ‘other’ in post-war European integration politics and much talked about in the context of Brexit, still awaits a thorough archival investigation.  In addition to several journal articles, the results from this research have also been published in an edited book European Integration Beyond Brussels: Unity in East and West Europe Since 1945 (with Suvi Kansikas) and a recent monograph Britain, the Division of Western Europe and the Creation of EFTA, 1955–1963 (with Richard T. Griffiths).

Going forward, my research will turn to examining the negotiations for what became the Maastricht Treaty, studying the process from a national, supranational and transnational level.

Before arriving in Leiden, I was Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Political Science and Contemporary History, University of Turku, Finland, with previous positions at the universities of Reading and Gloucestershire. I also enjoyed a short spell as a Jean Monnet Scholar at the European Studies Centre, University of Pittsburgh.