Oxford research fellow and historian of Britain's Special Operations Executive
In the historiography of wartime Albania, The Wildest Province (2008) was described as by far the most comprehensive work on the subject, telling the story of SOE's Albanian missions from deployment in 1943 to withdrawal in early 1945 from interviews and declassified files.
Roderick Bailey is a British historian at the University of Oxford, where he is a Wellcome Trust-funded research fellow specialising in the history of medicine, modern conflict, and the study of resistance, intelligence and clandestine warfare. He took an MA (1997) and PhD (2004) at the University of Edinburgh and an MPhil (1998) at the University of Cambridge, and has held posts at Oxford's Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine (2013-2016), the Faculty of History (2016-2018) and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities (from 2017). In April 2012 he was appointed by the Prime Minister as official historian of SOE's secret war against Mussolini's Italy; his books include The Wildest Province (2008) and Target: Italy (2014).
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 2008Published The Wildest Province: SOE in the Land of the Eagle
- 2012Appointed by the Prime Minister as official historian of SOE's secret war against Mussolini's Italy
- 2014Published Target: Italy: The Secret War against Mussolini
Related historical events
Research on SOE screening and the treatment of returning agents
In a Wellcome Trust-funded project at Oxford, Bailey examined the psychological stresses to which agents of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) were exposed during the Second World War. The study addressed how candidates for high-risk, high-strain unconventional service were recruited and screened, including pioneering tests and assessments by psychologists and psychiatrists; how effectively those processes identified personnel able to work in the field; and how returning agents with psychological problems were diagnosed and treated. His subject therefore encompassed not only clandestine operations but also their psychological demands and the care available to survivors.