Background
He was born on November 4, 1957 in Petts-Wood, Kent, England. His mother was a nurse and social worker, and his father worked as a shipbroker.
He was born on November 4, 1957 in Petts-Wood, Kent, England. His mother was a nurse and social worker, and his father worked as a shipbroker.
He went to Dulwich college preparatory school, and then Westminster school, before studying history at Merton College, Oxford, but it was his parents who introduced him to Italy, on family holidays. (In the immediate aftermath of the second world war, his father had served with the British army in Trieste.)
At 11, Christopher won a Mediterranean cruise as an essay prize. Before going to Oxford, he explored Italy by motorbike.
At Oxford, he first focused on medieval Italy. It was Mack Smith who inspired his interest in Italian unification and fascism.
From 1985 to 1990, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. During this period, he assisted Mack Smith and Moses Finley with updating their A History of Sicily book; this revised version was published in 1986. His first major work, Fascism and the Mafia, grew out of his DPhil, and was published in Italian in 1986 and in English in 1989. From 1990 to 1997, he retained a link with All Souls College, having been elected a Fifty-Pound Fellow.
In 1987, Duggan joined the University of Reading as a lecturer in history. Unusually for a historian, he was not based in the Department of History but in the Department of European Studies. He taught Italian history, politics, culture and language. In 1994, he was promoted to Reader. In 2002, he was appointed Professor of Modern Italian History. From 2008 to 2013, he was Head of the School of Languages and European Studies (later renamed the School of Literature and Languages).
Duggan wrote books about Italian history. A Concise History of Italy (1994) allowed him to return to his original interest in medieval history. The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 (2007) focuses on Italy in the 19th and 20th centuries. Francesco Crispi 1818–1901, the first biography on Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, explores Crispi's evolution from a revolutionary democrat to a bellicose authoritarian and his role in the unification of Italy. In his book Fascist Voices (2012), he used the diaries, memoirs and letters of thousands of ordinary Italian citizens to investigate why so many had closely identified with the early 20th-century fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.
Shortly before his death, Duggan had been appointed to a research professorship in the Department of History, Reading, and had been elected as a Two Year Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
Duggan was found dead on 2 November 2015; he was found hanged at his home in Twickenham, London. He was 57 years of age. A memorial service was held in the chapel of All Souls College, Oxford on 12 December. A full inquest into his death recorded a verdict of suicide.
Duggan met his wife Jennifer Mundy at the University of Oxford, and they married in 1987. She is an art historian and is currently the head of collection research at the Tate Gallery. They had two children: Amelia and Thomas.