Emmanuel Destenay received his PhD in Contemporary History from Sorbonne University in 2014. His doctoral research was funded by the Institute for Strategic Research of the French Ministry of Defence and examined the experiences of demobilisation of Irish veterans of the First World War. His thesis received the 2015 PhD Prize from the Irish Foundation of France. He held Research Fellowships at Oxford University (2011-2012), Stanford University (2015), and University College Dublin (2016-2019).
As part of the Irish Research Council (IRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship, he organised an international conference on Post-War Transitions in Europe: Politics, States and Veterans (1918-1939) at University College Dublin. It received funding from the Irish Research Council and the Embassy for France in Ireland. He also organised an international conference on Ireland, the First World War and the Irish Revolution. Continuities, Ruptures and Legacies at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris. It received financial support from the Embassy from Ireland in Paris.
He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and a fully-qualified teacher in English, French and History. He has received several awards from professional achievements (2015, 2016) and a Students’ Teaching Award (2015) from Exeter University.
To this day, Emmanuel has written three monographs, several book reviews and articles in international refereed journals.
His first monograph entitled Shadows from the Trenches. Veterans of the Great War and the Irish Revolution (1918-1923) was published by University College Dublin Press (2021). Thanks to this first single-authored book, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS) in 2021 and rewarded with an honorable mention, James S. Donnelly, Sr., Prize for Books in Humanities and Social Sciences at the annual American Conference for Irish Studies, 2022. His second monograph Divergent Destinies. Conscription, US Intervention and the Transformation of Ireland (1914-1918) appeared in 2022. It was published by Bloomsbury Academic.