Bruno Cabanes holds the Donald G. & Mary A. Dunn Chair in Modern Military History. He studied history at the Ecole normale supérieure (Ulm), in Paris (1989-1995), and earned his PhD, with distinction, from the Université Paris I- Panthéon Sorbonne (2002). In 2013, he completed his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Before joining the Ohio State University, he taught for nine years at Yale University (2005-2014). In 2026, he received the Distinguished Historian Award from the Ohio Academy of History, honoring "a distinguished historian, with an extensive record of publications and contributions to the profession."

Professor Cabanes is a historian of twentieth-century Europe, specializing in the social and cultural history of war. His scholarship focuses in particular on the transitions that followed World War I. He has examined this transformative period from multiple perspectives, including the demobilization of combatants, the war’s traumatic impact on soldiers and civilians, comparative analyses of postwar societies across the twentieth century, and, more recently, the environmental history of warfare and its aftermath.

His research on postwar transitions originated in his doctoral dissertation, later published as La Victoire endeuillée. La sortie de guerre des soldats français, 1918-1920 [Shrouded Victory: French Soldiers and the Transition to Civilian Life, 1918-1920] (Editions du Seuil, 2004). In this first monograph, Cabanes examines the demobilization of nearly five million French soldiers between 1918 and 1920, analyzing the rituals and ceremonies that marked both the literal and symbolic end of the conflict, as well as the often fraught reintegration of veterans into civilian life. He argues that the passage from war to peace—whether at the level of society or of individual survivors of the Great War—unfolded through successive phases of demobilization and remobilization, blurring any clear boundary between wartime and peacetime. Central to his interpretation is the argument that no genuine “cultural demobilization” accompanied, or followed, the protracted return of French troops. The book was awarded the Gustave Chaix d’Est-Ange Prize by the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques and was shortlisted for the Augustin-Thierry Prize for Best Book of the Year in Modern History in 2004.

His second monograph, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918-1924, (Cambridge University Press, 2014) won the Paul Birdsall Prize 2016, awarded biennially by the American Historical Association for a book on European military or strategic history since 1870. “Cabanes provides a riveting picture of the catastrophic humanitarian crisis that threatened global stability in the aftermath of World War I”, commented the Birdsall Committee. “Stateless refugees, wounded veterans, starving children, and displaced workers were among the multitudes in dire need of aid in the early years of that turbulent and painful ‘peace’. Cabanes foregrounds a Herculean humanitarian response undertaken by individuals and organizations during a time that resonates today.  His work deserves a wide readership both within the academy and outside.”

Cabanes’s third monograph, Août 14 (Éditions Gallimard, 2014) adopts a cultural lens to recount France’s entry into the First World War from the vantage point of ordinary men and women swept up in the tidal wave of mobilization. While the decisive month of August 1914 has typically been examined through the actions of diplomats and general staffs, it has far less often been understood as a lived national experience—one that gripped an entire society. Drawing on largely overlooked sources—police reports, private correspondence, and personal diaries—Cabanes restores the emotional landscape of the moment: the anguish of separation, the dread of an uncertain future, fears of internal enemies, and the looming specter of invasion. A finalist for the nonfiction Prix Femina in 2014, the book appeared in English translation in 2016 as August 1914. France, The Great War and a Month that Changed the World Forever (Yale University Press), winning the 2017 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title.

After exploring wartime experience and the very notion of transition—both from war to peace and from peace to war—in his first three monographs, Cabanes turned his attention to the spatial dimensions of conflict. His work is currently investigating the reconfiguration of battlefields under modern warfare; the environmental consequences of global conflict; the imagined and lived spaces of combatants; and the evolving geographies of war commemoration.

Cabanes's  fourth monograph (Les fantômes de l'île de Peleliu. Récit ) [The Ghosts of the Island of Peleliu]  explores the intertwined questions of memory and identity on Peleliu Island in Palau. Retracing the wartime experience of Eugene B. Sledge—a young U.S. Marine who fought there in the autumn of 1944—Cabanes conducted several research journeys to Palau between 2017 and 2023. The book unfolds as a form of temporal excavation. Moving through the island’s dense jungle and cave systems, Cabanes meditates on the traces, vestiges, and lingering memories of a ten-week battle. Peleliu emerges as a palimpsest of layered histories: early voyages of exploration, ethnographic encounters, and successive Spanish, German, and Japanese colonialisms. Blending travel writing with American, Japanese, and Palauan personal testimonies, archival sources, and on-site fieldwork, the work offers a vivid, almost lyrical portrait of the island, revealing its historical depth and emotional resonance. It was published in August 2025 by Éditions du Seuil in its prestigious “Fiction & Cie” series.

Among other publications, Cabanes is the author of "Les vivants et les morts. La France au sortir de la Grande Guerre", in Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Christophe Prochasson, eds., Sortir de la Grande Guerre (Taillandier, 2008), "Le syndrome du survivant: histoire et usages d’une notion", in Bruno Cabanes and Guillaume Piketty, eds., Retour à l’intime au sortir de la guerre (Taillandier, 2009), Negotiating Intimacy in the Shadow of War, (France, 1914-1920s), French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 31, No.1, Spring 2013, p. 1-23, “1919: Aftermath” in Jay Winter ed., Cambridge History of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2014), “Violence and the First World War” in Philip Dwyer and Joy Damousi eds., Cambridge World History of Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2020), The Great War and the American Experience (Gallimard, 2017), « We, the Returnees », Wars’ Aftermaths and Combatants’ Homecomings in the Twentieth Century”, Gunjishigaku, March 2020, Vol. 55, No.4 (in Japanese), and « The Right to Reparations: A Legal Concept in Postwar France”, in Beyond the Great War. Making Peace in a Disordered World, edited by Norman Ingram and Carl Bouchard, London and Toronto, The University of Toronto Press, 2022.

Cabanes has published: Un siècle de réfugiés. Photographier l’exil (Seuil, 2019), in which he interrogates the uses of photography for humanitarian purposes, from the outbreak of the First World War to more recent and ongoing crises in Syria, the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and along the U.S.–Mexico border. In this work, he interrogates the visual regimes through which exile has been framed and circulated across the past century. Conceived as a plea for alternative modes of representing displacement, the book foregrounds the work of a new generation of photographers who redirect attention to lived experience—capturing the textures of daily life in refugee camps or the intimate objects refugees carry with them. In doing so, it gestures toward a more reciprocal visual practice, one that seeks to foster dialogue between refugees and those who bear witness to their stories through the lens.

At Éditions du Seuil, Cabanes has also authored Fragments de violence. La guerre en objets de 1914 à nos jours (2020), in which he examines the status of “objects of war” and traces the shifting meanings of categories such as emblems, trophies, prostheses, and relics across the conflicts of the twentieth century.

Cabanes serves on the steering committee of the Historial de la Grande Guerre's International Research Center, the foremost museum and research center in Europe on the First World War, and on the advisory board of the Museum of the Great War in Verdun. He is a member of the editorial boards of L’Histoire (since 1999), 20&21. Revue d’Histoire (since 2012) and Sensibilités. Histoire, Critique, Sciences Sociales (since 2016). He served as a scientific advisor for a TV documentary on 1918-1919 and the end of the First World War, released prime time on French television in November of 2019. Finally, Cabanes currently serves on the advisory committee of the ERC project "The Global War on Civilians, 1905-1945", led by Sheldon Garon (Princeton University).

From 2012-2017, Cabanes has led fifty-seven of the world’s leading scholars in the field in producing a comprehensive history of modern warfare. This 800-page edited volume was published by Editions du Seuil as Une Histoire de la guerre, in 2018. This edited volume seeks to chart new directions for future research while offering a wide-ranging, global analysis of modern conflict. It places particular emphasis on non-Western regions—so often relegated to the margins of conventional narratives of modern warfare—by examining their dynamic and often entangled relationships with the Western world. Rather than assembling a sequence of case studies, the volume adopts a thematic framework for understanding warfare across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its chapters explore a broad spectrum of issues, including strategy and technology, gender relations, displacement and captivity, child soldiers, and the environmental consequences of war, among other critical dimensions of armed conflict. Une Histoire de la Guerre was selected as one of the “25 Books of the Year 2018” by the French magazine Le Point. Published in German as Eine Geschichte des Krieges. Vom 19. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart (Hamburger Edition, September 2020), in Italian as Una Storia della Guerra (Bompiani, October 2022), and in Korean (2024), it is under contract for the Chinese  edition (forthcoming in 2026).

In the autumn 2021, Cabanes co-organized an online workshop on “Globalizing the History of the World Wars”, featuring some of the world’s best experts in the field. This workshop was the exploratory step for a conference on the globalization of the history of the world wars (held on the OSU campus in October 2022; sponsored by Arts&Sciences and the Mershon Center) and a volume (co-edited with Cameron Givens and currently in production with Cambridge University Press -- expected publication in July-August 2026).

In June 2024, he co-organized—alongside Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, John Horne, and the International Research Center (IRC) of the Historial de la Grande Guerre—an international conference in Amiens on "The Great War: Toward a Cultural History of Politics." The conference examined the war’s “long ending” through 1923, the subsequent political and cultural demobilization of wartime attitudes, and the enduring influence of World War I’s warnings, memories, and lessons on the descent into a new conflict in the 1930s and early 1940s. A volume resulting from this conference is currently under consideration by Cambridge University Press for their series Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare.