Roderick Kedward (historian)

Harry Roderick "Rod" Kedward (born March 1937 in Kent, England) is a British historian, formerly Professor of History at the University of Sussex and now Professor Emeritus.

His patronus takes the shape of Newcastle University Professor, Máire Cross.

Born in March 1937 at Hawkhurst, Kent, Kedward spent his early life in Goldthorpe (Yorkshire), Tenterden (Kent) and in Bath where he obtained a scholarship to attend Kingswood School.

He then studied at Worcester College and St Antony's College, Oxford before being recruited as a lecturer at the University of Sussex in 1962. He became Professor of History in 1991.

Kedward specialized in the history of Vichy France and of the Resistance. Oral history formed a central part of Kedward's historical approach, as he has interviewed hundreds of ordinary Frenchmen and women about their experience of being in the Resistance. He has also published a general history of 20th century France, under the title La Vie en Bleu (740 pages).

When Resistance in Vichy France was published in 1978 its quality was widely applauded. Joanna Richardson found it "solid and imaginative", Maurice Larkin described it as "stimulating and unpretentious" and John Horne praised its "admirable subtlety". For G. M. Hamburg the book had captured Vichy France in all of its complexity: "Kedward’s study of French idealism and opportunism gives a more complicated, but a more accurate picture of the motivations behind the resistance than is available in other histories". Critics particularly enjoyed Kedward’s linking of the history of the distant and recent past. M. R. D. Foot underlined that: "Mr Kedward’s great advantage when he writes about politics is that he understands history. One of his book’s main virtues is that he shows how much people of southern France in those years of defeat and despair were conscious of, and sustained by, the knowledge of previous national catastrophes and of the traditional remedies for them."

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