Staff profile

Tom Stammers is a cultural historian of France in the long nineteenth century. His 2020 book The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Cultures in Post-Revolutionary Paris (Cambridge University Press) explores the politics of collecting, the art market and cultural heritage in nineteenth-century France. It was named the winner of the 2020 Gladstone Prize from the Royal Historical Society for the best first book on non-British history. He continues to publish work related to nineteenth-century collecting, connoisseurship, museum institutions and the historiography of art, with a particular interest in the work of Francis Haskell. He also publishes on the tangible traces, cultural memory and historiography of the French Revolution.

He has two major forthcoming projects. The first concerns the experiences of the Orleans dynasty in exile after 1848 and the transformation of the political culture of monarchism. Analysing the itineraries, liberal ideas, cosmopolitan friendships and collections of Louis-Philippe, comte de Paris (1838-94), this work work fits into a wider exploration of the global networks of nineteenth-century royalism.

The second project grows out of past research related to anti-Semitism, the art market and Jewish collectors in the late nineteenth century. Tom is co-investigator for the major AHRC grant "Jewish" Country Houses: Objects, Networks, People (2019-23), where has has responsbility for the strand dedicated to exploring Jewish collecting in modern Europe. The grant investigates the social, cultural and material world of Jewish country houses as a pan-European phenomenon, and involves collaborations with historic houses, galleries and heritage organisations in Britain and Europe. For more information, see: jch.history.ox.ac.uk.

He is a regular contributor and feature writer for the arts magazine Apollo, as well as other literary and arts reviews, and in January 2017 co-curated an exhibition at the Bowes Museum on 'The Allure of Napoleon'. He is the deputy director of CNCS and sits on the board of the Zurbaran Centre. In 2021-22, Tom will be co-director of the Durham Centre for Visual Arts and Cultures (CVAC) with Professor Christina Riggs. He has supervised a large number of graduate students, including on collaborative doctoral projects with the Bowes Museum and the National Gallery, London.

Tom is interested in a wide range of historiographical and theoretical controversies related to Europe in the long nineteenth century.

• Aesthetics and Politics
• Counter-Revolutionary Thought and Culture c.1789-1900
• France, c.1750-1900
• Heritage and Historical Consciousness
• Jewish Cultural History
• Museums and Collecting
• The Enlightenment and European Romanticism
• The French Revolutionary Tradition

• 2000: Deakin Fellow (European Studies Centre Oxford/ Maison Francaise d'Oxford) 2015-16:
• 2000: Winner of the RHS Gladstone Prize 2021:
• 2000: Winner of the French History Best Article Prize 2008:

Authored book

• Stammers, T. (2020). The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Cultures in Post-Revolutionary Paris c.1790–1890. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108781268

Chapter in book

• Stammers, T. (2024). Othering the Ex-Libris: Israel Solomons (1860–1923) and the Invention of the Jewish Bookplate. In L. Jordanova, & F. Grant (Eds.), Where Words and Images Meet. London: Bloomsbury
• Stammers, T. (2023). Before the Visual Turn: Twentieth-Century Historians and the Uses of Art. In J. Fox, & V. Simoniti (Eds.), Art and knowledge after 1900: Interactions between modern art and thought. Manchester University Press
• Stammers, T. (2023). Introduction: The Fall and Rise of the Psychology of Collecting: Historiographical Reflections. In M. Woźniak-Koch (Ed.), Mapping Art Collecting in Europe, 1860-1940: Eastern and Western Sociocultural Perspectives (1-26). Brill Academic Publishers. https://doi.org/10.30965/9783657795437_002
• Stammers, T. (2023). Elite and Popular Connoisseurship at the Louvre c.1848–1870. In P. Stewart, & C. M. Anderson (Eds.), Connoisseurship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190923587.003.0005
• Stammers, T. (2021). Collecting and the Contemporary Antiquarian: Documenting the Present in Fin-de-Siecle Paris. In J. Wright, & A. Fryxell (Eds.), Time on a Human Scale: Experiencing the Present in Europe, c.1860-1930 (121-155). Oxford University Press
• Stammers, T. (2021). Salvage and Speculation: The London Art Market After the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). In K. Hill (Ed.), Museums, modernity and conflict : museums and collections in and of war since the nineteenth century (15-38). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429295782-2
• Stammers, T. (2021). Delecluze’s Augustus And Cinna: Painting and Performing Rome at the End of the Napoleonic Empire. In M. C. Potter (Ed.), Representing the Past in the Art of the Long Nineteenth Century Historicism, Postmodernism, and Internationalism (48-69). Routledge
• Stammers, T. (2017). Graphiksammler. In R. Reichardt (Ed.), Lexikon der Revolutions-Ikonographie in der europäischen Druckgraphik (1789-1889) (149-166). Rhema
• Stammers, T. (2016). Enlightenment Intersections in the work of Jeffrey Rubinoff. In J. Fox (Ed.), The art of Jeffrey Rubinoff (153-168). Douglas & McIntyre
• Stammers, T. (2016). The Myth of the Belle Madeleine: street culture and celebrity in nineteenth-century Paris. In M. Calaresu, & D. V. Heuvel (Eds.), Food Hawkers: Selling in the street from Antiquity to the Present (136-164). Routledge
• Stammers, T. (2016). Jean-Louis Soulavie: une collection de l'histoire immédiate. In G. Bertrand, M. Biard, & A. Chevalier (Eds.), Collectionner la Révolution française (81-93). Société des Études Robespierristes
• Stammers, T. (2014). Scavenging rococo: Trouvailles, Bibelots and Counter-Revolutionary Politics. In M. Hyde, & K. Scott (Eds.), Rococo Echo: Art, History and Historiography from Cochin to Coppola (71-86). Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford
• Stammers, T. (2013). The Faubourg Saint-Antoine: Epicentre of Revolution?. In A. Milne (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris (52-70). Cambridge University Press
• Stammers, T. (2013). Rendering the Rag-Picker in Nineteenth-Century Paris. In A. Milano (Ed.), Generals and Beggars, Actors and Sovereigns: Portraits in Widely Circulating Prints from the XVII to XX Century (393-99). Tassotti
• Stammers, T. (2008). The Refuse of the Revolution: Autograph Collecting in France 1789-1860. In C. Armenteros, T. Blanning, I. DiVanna, & D. Dodds (Eds.), Historicising the French Revolution (39-63). Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Conference Paper

• Stammers, T. (2020). L’exception anglaise ? Constance Battersea et la philanthropie artistique des Rothschild d’outre-manche. In P. Prevost-Marcilhacy, & L. de Fuccia (Eds.), De la sphère privée à la sphère publique: les collections Rothschild dans les institutions publiques françaises

Edited book

• Stammers, T. (Ed.). (2017). The Allure of Napoleon: Essays Inspired by the Collections of the Bowes Museum. Barnard Castle, The Bowes Museum

Journal Article

• Freund, A., & Stammers, T. (2024). Harping on patriotism: female education meets Orléanist ambition in Jean-Antoine-Théodore Giroust’s The Harp Lesson (1791). French History, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crad060
• Stammers, T. (2023). Materializing France in exile: Henri, duc d’Aumale, the Orléans family and the transnational politics of collecting c. 1848–80. French History, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crad048
• Stammers, T. (2022). Jewishness, antiquity and civilization. Journal of the History of Collections, 34(3), 427-440. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhac006
• Stammers, T., & Hilary, J. (2022). Introduction: Bildung beyond borders: German–Jewish collectors outside Germany, c.1870–1940. Journal of the History of Collections, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhab059
• Stammers, T. (2021). Women Collectors and Cultural Philanthropy, 1850-1920. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 31, https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.3347
• Stammers, T. (2020). La mondialisation de la Révolution française (vers 1930-1960) : origines et eclipse d'un paradigme historiographique. Annales (English ed. Online), 74(2), 297-335. https://doi.org/10.1017/ahss.2020.10
• Stammers, T. (2019). Transmitting the French Revolution: A Compulsive History. H-France salon, 11(18), 1-16
• Davoli, S., & Stammers, T. (2019). Jewish Collectors and Collecting: an Introduction. Journal of the History of Collections,
• Stammers, T. (2019). The Homeless Heritage of the French Revolution, c.1789-1889. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 25(5), 478-490. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2018.1431688
• Stammers, T. (2019). Old French and new money: Jews and the aesthetics of the Old Regime in transnational perspective, c.1860–1910. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 18(4), 489-512. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2019.1658945
• Stammers, T. (2018). From the Tuileries to Twickenham: The Orléans, Exile and Anglo-French Liberalism, c.1848–1880. The English Historical Review, 133(564), 1120-1154. https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cey269
• Stammers, T. (2018). Facets of French Heritage: Selling the Crown Jewels in the Early Third Republic. The Journal of Modern History, 90(1), 76-115. https://doi.org/10.1086/695884
• Stammers, T. (2018). Historian, Patriot and Paragon of Taste: Baron Jean-Charles Davillier (1823–83) and the Study of Ceramics in Nineteenth-Century France
• Stammers, T. (2014). Collectors, Catholics, and the Commune: Heritage and Counterrevolution, 1860-1890. French Historical Studies, 37(1), 53-87. https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-2376519
• Stammers, T. (2013). Salvaging and Archiving the French Revolution
• Stammers, T. (2008). The Bric-à-Brac of the Old Regime: Collecting and Cultural History in post-revolutionary France. French History, 22(3), 295-315. https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crn026