Andrew Tompkins is a historian of transnational relations in 20th-century Europe and a researcher at the German Historical Institute Warsaw, where his work examines the history of the German-Polish border during the Cold War.

His first monograph, Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany, was published in 2016 with Oxford University Press. It examines the anti-nuclear energy movement in order to understand how transnational protest networks function. In 2023-2024, Andrew Tompkins was wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (Assistant Professor) at the Chair for the History of Western Europe at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he previously held a Humboldt Post-Doc Fellowship (2013-2016). He has also worked as Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Sheffield (2016-2020) and held a DAAD Fellowship at the Universität Erfurt and the Uniwersytet Wrocławski (2020-2022).

Andrew Tompkins received his doctorate (DPhil) from the University of Oxford in 2013 after previously receiving M.A. degrees in History from the University of Chicago (2007-2008) and in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po).

Transnational history of Europe since 1945, with particular emphasis on social and environmental history. Areas of research include:

• Contemporary history of Germany, Poland and France
• interdisciplinary border studies
• social movements and protest

Monographs

Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Edited volumes

Jan Hansen Jochen Hung, Jaroslav Ira, Judit Klement, Sylvain Lesage, Juan Luis Simal, and Andrew Tompkins, eds., The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2023. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0323.

Jan Hansen, Jochen Hung, Andrew Tompkins, and Phillip Wagner, eds., Special issue, The Material Culture of Modern Politics in Cold War Europe. International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 6, no. 1 (2018). https://brill.com/view/journals/hcm/6/1/hcm.6.issue-1.xml.

Journal articles

Caught in the Net: Fish, Ships, and Oil in the GDR-Poland Territorial Waters Dispute, 1945–1989. In Central European History 56, no. 2 (2023): 173–195. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938922001029.

Generating Post-Modernity: Nuclear Energy Opponents and the Future in the 1970s. In European Review of History / Revue européenne d’histoire 28, no. 4 (2021): 507–530. https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2021.1881047.

Binding the Nation, Bounding the State: Germany and Its Borders. In German History 37, no. 1 (2019): 77–100.
https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghy116. 

Introduction: The Material Culture of Politics. In International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 6, no. 1 (2018): 1–12. With Jan Hansen, Jochen Hung, and Phillip Wagner. https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.537. 

Grassroots Transnationalism(s): Franco-German Opposition to Nuclear Energy in the 1970s. In Contemporary European History 25, no. 1 (2016): 117–142. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777315000508.

The Transnational in the Local: The Larzac Plateau as a Site of Transnational Activism since 1970. In Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 3 (2015): 581–605. With Robert Gildea. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022009414557909. 

Transnationality as a Liability? The Anti-Nuclear Movement at Malville. In Revue Belge de Philosophie et d’Histoire 89, nos. 3–4 (2011): 1365–1380. https://doi.org/10.3406/rbph.2011.8361.

Chapters in edited volumes

An ‘Ecological Internationale’?: Nuclear Energy Opponents in Western Europe, 1975–80. In Michele Di Donato and Mathieu Fulla, eds., Leftist Internationalisms: A Transnational Political History, 219–232. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350252523.ch-14.

„Unter vorläufiger französischer Verwaltung“: Staatsterritorium, Grundbesitz und die Grenzen des Deutschen Reiches in der westlichen Bundesrepublik. In Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 49 (2022): 174–216.

Alle Wege führen nach Gorleben: Transnationale Netzwerke der Anti-AKW-Bewegung der 1970er Jahre. In Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann, Jenny Hagemann, Christian Hellwig, Karolin Quambusch, and Wienke Stegmann, eds., Der Gorleben-Treck 1979: Anti-Atom-Protest als soziale Bewegung und demokratischer Lernprozess, 150–172. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020.

Towards a “Europe of Struggles”?: Three Visions of Europe in the Early Anti-Nuclear Energy Movement, 1975–79. In Eric Bussière, Anahita Grisoni, Hélène Miard-Delacroix, and Christian Wenke, eds., The Environment and the European Public Sphere: Perceptions, Actors, Policies, 124–146. Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2020.

Textbook chapters

Borders in Contemporary Europe. With Lorena de Vita, Jaroslav Ira, and Thomas Serrier. In The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2023. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0323.06.

Protest and Social Movements in Contemporary Europe. With Claire Barillé, Kostis Kornetis, and Erika Szívós. In The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2023. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0323.39.

Understanding and Controlling the Environment in Contemporary Europe. With Jiří Janáč, Sophie Lange, and Juan Pan-Montojo. In The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2023. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0323.51.

Reviews

Florian Peters, Von Solidarność zur Shocktherapie. In H-Soz-u-Kult (2024). https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-135800.

Astrid Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands. In German History 39 (2021): 330–332. https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghab008.

Dolores Augustine, Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present. In German Studies Review 44, no. 1 (2021): 208–210. https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2021.0028.

Dominik Gerst, Maria Klessmann, and Hannes Krämer, eds., Grenzforschung. Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Studium. In H-Soz-u-Kult (2021). https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-95728.

Stephen Milder, Greening Democracy. In H-German Reviews (August 2020). https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=50154.

Andrew W. M. Smith, Terror and Terroir. In French History 32, no. 4 (2018): 615–617. https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/cry078.

Nancy A. Naples and Jennifer Bickham Mendez, eds., Border Politics. In Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 2 (2017): 474–476. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022009416688182.

Eleanor Davey, Idealism beyond Borders. In Social History 43, no. 1 (2017): 156–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2017.1397367.

T. S. Brown, West Germany and the Global 1960s. In German History 32, no. 3 (2014): 507–509. https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghu024.

Other

Tagungsbericht: Phantomgrenzen in Ostmitteleuropa: Zwischenbilanz eines neuen Forschungskonzeptes, February 17–19, 2014, Berlin. In H-Soz-u-Kult (2014). https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-5310.