Christopher Duggan was a distinguished British academic (a historian, to be precise) who researched and taught at the University of Oxford and the University of Reading for the balance of his career. Born in Kent, England, into a middle-class family, he attended the Westminster School before enrolling as an undergraduate at Oxford. He developed a keen interest in modern Italian history and chose to focus his career on the subject; he was eventually named Head of the School of Languages and European Studies at Reading. Duggan wrote several books on Italy in the 19th and 20th centuries, including Fascist Voices (2012), before his death in late 2015.