Emile Chabal was educated at the University of Cambridge, Rice University, Harvard University and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. He has previously worked as Departmental Lecturer in Modern European History at Balliol College, Oxford and as a Research Fellow in French Political History at St John's College, Cambridge. In 2013, he became a Chancellor's Fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh and was promoted to Reader in 2018. His research has focused on French politics and postcolonial history. His next major project is an intellectual biography of the historian Eric Hobsbawm, for which he was awarded a two-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Leadership Fellowship in 2017. He is also the director of the Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History, the leading research centre on the history of the modern world in Edinburgh.