Marina PEREZ DE ARCOS

Marina Pérez de Arcos DPhil MPhil FRHisS

Marina is an international historian and scholar of International Relations specialising in the twentieth century. After serving as Head of History and Politics at the London School of Economics’ new continental European campuses, she won a European Union Horizon research grant at the University of Venice (Global Venice), in partnership with the University of Oxford, having previously completed her doctorate there.

She has over ten years’ experience teaching undergraduate and graduate students in History and International Relations at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics, where she received the Best Teacher Award. She served as the founding Spanish Studies Coordinator at Oxford for nearly five years, where she undertook speech-writing tasks for senior university officials and led public engagement activities related to research design, implementation, and impact.

She is the Principal Investigator of the Horizon Europe-funded research projects EUHuman: European Humanitarian Networks during the Great War and EUHumanPLUS: Protecting Powers – European Humanitarian Networks during the First World War. The aim of these projects is to: uncover new evidence of humanitarian efforts carried out by European protecting powers; conduct an analysis and generate a fresh body of knowledge regarding the origins and cross-Atlantic transfer of knowledge within European humanitarianism; Europeanise the scholarly and public narratives of humanitarianism in WWI; and explore the connection between historical and present-day European relief efforts that may be relevant to policy-making. This is done with a specific focus on the knowledge exchange, tensions, and connections between humanitarian activities, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, the European War Office in Spain, and the Quakers, while also surfacing and exploring the role of women and incorporating international humanitarian law.

Winner of the Elizabeth Greenhalgh Award for Outstanding Emerging Female Scholar in First World War Studies, she has published widely on humanitarianism in international peer-reviewed journals, including the International History Review, First World War Studies, Immigrants & Minorities, and the Bulletin of Spanish Studies (for which she won the Best Article of the Year Award). Her work also covers other topics in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Global Studies Quarterly, Hispanic Research Journal, and the Journal of Contemporary European History.

She is Secretary of the German History Society, serves on the board of the Society for the History of War, and is Head of Scholarships Trustee of the British-Spanish Society, a charity that has promoted cultural and educational ties between Britain and Spain for over a century. She has also been awarded the US National Library of Medicine’s deBakey Fellowship, the Harvard University Houghton Library Fellowship, and a European Commission’s Global Fellowship to Yale.

She is a regular contributor of history-based op-eds to Spain's most-read digital newspaper and has served as an advisor to several local, national, and international institutions across Europe.