Julian is acting as Deputy Faculty Pro-Vice Chancellor for the Faculty of Arts Design and Social Sciences, having been Head of the Department of Humanities since 2017. He is a historian of modern Europe who has worked extensively on French intellectual, political and cultural history. The author of two books with Oxford University Press, on regionalism and socialism, he is particularly fascinated by the idea and experience of time in the present. Working with colleagues from other disciplines, he is leading a project called 'Time on a Human Scale' which puts the human present back into the cultural, philosophical and literary history of Europe between 1860 and 1930.

Julian's new project on the experience of ordinary people who were living 'outside of time' in the era of the Second World War demands a focus on the practices of the everyday, from writing to performing to familial relationships, and how people tried to reconstruct these ordinary temporal rhythms in difficult conditions, from those living under siege to prisoners in camps or people living in secrecy in occupied Europe.

Before appointment to Northumbria University in 2017, Julian taught in the History Department at Durham University for thirteen years. Earlier in his career he was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church Oxford and prior to that a Senior Scholar of the Modern History Faculty in Oxford, where he was educated as an undergraduate and DPhil student. He has held a visiting professorship at the École des hautes Études en Sciences sociales, Paris. 

Julian is co-editor of the journal French History.

He has a wider role in the region's music life as musical director of the adult chamber choir The Durham Singers:https://www.durham-singers.org/