Back

Andrew Chandler is Director of the George Bell Institute and Reader in Modern History, where he teaches in the departments of History and Theology. The George Bell Institute is an international body of over thirty scholars, writers and performers living and working with critical independence outside established university institutions across the world.

Andrew Chandler read History at the University of Birmingham and wrote his PhD, a study of the impact of the National Socialist state in Germany on the Church of England, 1933-1945 at the University of Cambridge. Between 1990 and 1996 he taught at the Universities of Birmingham and Keele. He also worked as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton and, in 1995, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He established the George Bell Institute at the Queen's Foundationin Birmingham in 1996 and brought it to the University of Chichester in 2007.

Andrew Chandler's research interests embrace the interrelationship between politics, religion and diplomacy across the twentieth century. His work shows a particular commitment to Britain and Continental Europe, to issues of church and state, democracy and dictatorship, and to the evolution of international organizations. His 2005 study of the history of the Church Commissioners, 1948-1998, broke new ground in integrating the themes of religion, politics and international investments. He has organized a succession of international conferences in Britain, Russia, Italy and Poland. The most recent of these has been devoted to 'Intellectual Freedom and the Church', at George Bell House in Chichester. Currently he is writing a study of the career of Archbishop Lang for Ashgate while setting to work on a multi-volume edition of the writings and papers of George Bell, bishop of Chichester, 1929-1958. Ultimately, this series will accompany his biography of Bell. He regularly gives papers at conferences and international gatherings.

Andrew Chandler isthe editor of the George Bell Institute’s international journal,Humanitas, a publication now running into its eleventh volume, andis also Co-editor of the journal Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/ Contemporary Church History. He is chief editor of the new Ashgate series,The Archbishops of Canterbury, a considerable undertaking overseen by a panel of scholars from a number of countries. He has served as a member of the Council of the Church of England Record Society and is presently a member of the national committee of the Ecclesiastical History Society. In2010 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Andrew Chandler teaches undergraduate courses in modern British, European and American history. He has also supervised post-graduate students in modern British political and religious history.

Selected recent publications

Books

The Church of England in the Twentieth Century: The Church Commissioners and the Politics of Reform, 1948-1998 (Boydell, 2005).

Brethren in adversity: Bishop George Bell and the crisis of German Protestantism (Boydell & Brewer, 1997).

Presences Felt: Encounters in a Lost Century (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2004).

The Moral Imperative: New Essays on the Ethics of Resistance in National Socialist Germany, 1933-1945 (Westview, 1998).

The Terrible Alternative: Christian Martyrdom in the Twentieth Century (Cassell, 1998).

Articles

‘The Church of England and the Obliteration Bombing of Germany during the Second World War, in the English Historical Review (1993).

‘The Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’ in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1994).

‘A Question of Fundamental Principles: The Church of England and the Jews of Germany, 1933-1937, in the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (1993).

‘Lambeth Palace, the Church of England and the Jews of Germany and Austria in 1938’, in the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (1995).

‘Munich and Morality: the Bishops of the Church of England and Appeasement, in Twentieth Century British History (1993).

‘Protestantism and Catholicism during the Second World War’ for Hugh McLeod (ed.) World Christianities: The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. IX (2005).

‘Christian Ethics and the Crisis of Civilization: Bishop George Bell and the Second World War’, in Peter Stone (ed.) Ethics and the Military (UNESCO/Boydell & Brewer, 2010)

‘The Judgement of an Archbishop: Archbishop Lang and the morality of British Foreign Policy, 1933-1939’, in Keith Robbins (ed.) Religion and National Policy in the twentieth Century (forthcoming, Brill, Leiden, 2009).