Professor Richard Toye

Professor Richard Toye is an internationally renowned Professor of History with an outstanding scholarly reputation and an extensive track record of administrative and leadership excellence. He is the former Head of Department and now Director of Global Excellence (History) at University of Exeter, with experience at the University of Cambridge, the University of St. Gallen, and Venice International University.

Professor Toye studies the history of Britain in its global and imperial context in the period from the late nineteenth century to the present day. He is particularly interested in the rhetorical dimensions of politics, economics, and empire. The topics he has worked on include the thought of John Maynard Keynes and the writings of H.G. Wells, as well as Britain’s role in international trade negotiations and the history of the United Nations. In recent years, one of his major interests has been the rhetorical culture of the House of Commons and the print culture surrounding general elections. His broad concern with the societal impact of rhetoric can be seen, for example, in Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882-1956 (OUP, 2017). That book, which Professor Toye co-authored with Martin Thomas, takes an explicitly comparative approach, reflecting his wider efforts to set the political culture of Britain and the Empire-Commonwealth in its global context. His most recent book is Age of Hope: Labour, 1945, and the Birth of Modern Britain (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Professor Toye is an expert on the life, career, and reputation of Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill: A Life in the News (OUP, 2020) explores Churchill’s journalism, his media image (and his efforts to control it), and the reception of news about him by ordinary readers and viewers. This builds on the approach that Professor Toye used in The Roar of the Lion: The Untold Story of Churchill’s World War II Speeches (OUP, 2013) which showed that Churchill’s oratory generated much more controversy and criticism than legend suggests. The Churchill Myths (OUP, 2020), which Professor Toye co-authored with Steven Fielding and Bill Schwarz, explores how Churchill’s reputation has been exploited in the decades since his death, by, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, amongst others. They show, for example, how both sides in the Brexit debate have tried to make use of Churchill’s (highly contested) views on European integration for their own purposes.