Professor Jonathan Conlin

Professor Jonathan Conlin

Professor of Modern History

Research interests

  • History of Heathrow Airport
  • The Chevalière Deon and her place in trans history
  • Late Ottoman Empire/Middle East and 1923 Lausanne Treaty

More research

Accepting applications from PhD students.

Connect with Jonathan

About

I am a historian of cultural history from c. 1750 to the present, currently researching the social and cultural history of Heathrow Airport - an interest I developed after several years' activity as a volunteer befriender inside IRC Harmondsworth, a secure immigration detention facility next to Heathrow. This history will consider what the history of Heathrow's lounges, hotels, shops, Animal Reception Centre as well as the communities who settled nearby to work in the catering and service sectors can tell us about modern Britain. 

I recently finished work on a biography of the Chevalière Deon (1728-1810), the French trans diplomat and spy. Please click on the "Research" tab for more on this project. This project built on previous scholarship on Anglo-French cultural and political relations, including Tales of Two Cities, the first comparative history of Paris and London. 

In 2017 I co-founded The Lausanne Project (TLP), which explores the legacy of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne a century on, in particular its role in shaping attitudes towards identity and migration in Greece, Turkey and the world at large. This project emerged from a biography of the Anglo-Armenian oil magnate, financier and art collector Calouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955). To date TLP has organized three conferences and four workshops for academics, high school history teachers and their pupils, as well as hosting a podcast (70 episodes and counting), and publishing a graphic novel and lesson plans for high school classroom use (in Greek, Turkish and English).

My PhD addressed the early history of the National Gallery (London), and I remain active in the field of museum studies. In 2024 I published The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People The National Gallery commissioned me to write their authorized bicentenary history. I appeared alongside Claudia Winkleman, Michael Palin and others in the 2024 documentary film My National Gallery, which was shown in over 300 cinemas across the UK (as well as in the US), before being broadcast over the Christmas period on ITV.