Bruno Cabanes is the Donald G. & Mary A. Dunn Chair in Modern Military History. He studied history at the Ecole normale supérieure, in Paris, and received his PhD, with distinction, from the Université Paris I- Panthéon Sorbonne, and his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches, from the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Prior to coming to Ohio State, he taught for nine years at Yale University.

Professor Cabanes is a historian of twentieth-century Europe, and more specifically, the social and cultural history of war. He is particularly interested in the period of transition that followed World War I. He has analyzed this topic from a variety of angles: the demobilization of combat troops, the traumatic impact of war on soldiers and civilians, a comparative study of the different post-war periods in the twentieth century, and, more recently, the environmental history of war and its aftermath.

His research on post-war transitions began with his doctoral dissertation, La Victoire endeuillée. La sortie de guerre des soldats français, 1918-1920 [Victory in Mourning: French Soldiers and the Transition to Civilian Life, 1918-1920]. La Victoire endeuillée was awarded the Gustave Chaix d'Est Ange Prize by the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in Paris, and short-listed for the Augustin-Thierry Prize for the Best Book of the Year in Modern History.  His second monograph, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918-1924, revisits the same period from a transnational perspective. His most recent book, Août 1914 (Éditions Gallimard, 2014) employs a cultural approach, telling the story of France's entry in World War I from the perspective of ordinary men caught in the flood of mobilization. Août 14 was a finalist for the Prix Fémina for non-fiction in 2015. It will be published in English translation by Yale University Press in 2016. Professor Cabanes is currently working on a big editorial project, The History of Modern War, 19th-21st Centuries, under his editorship (under contract with the Editions du Seuil, 2017).