In 2003, under the supervision of
Christopher Bayly, he gained a PhD in
South Asian history from the
University of Cambridge. He subsequently completed a four-year research fellowship at
King's College there, followed by a two-year research associate post at the
University of Edinburgh. Wagner then became a lecturer in imperial and World history at the
University of Birmingham, before being employed at
Queen Mary's in 2012. In 2015 he was granted a
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship working with historian Dane Kennedy at
George Washington University in the United States, which he finished in 2018.
Thuggee His book on
thuggees, titled
Thuggee: Banditry and the British in early nineteenth-century India, was published in 2007 and was short-listed for the
History Today Book of the Year Award in 2008. He followed that up with a source book on thuggees titled
Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee (2009).
Skull of Alum Bheg In 2014, he was approached by the owners of the Lord Clyde pub in Kent, who wished to dispose of a skull in their possession. An accompanying note revealed the skull to be that of
sepoy Alum Bheg of the
Bengal Regiment, who, following the
Indian Rebellion of 1857, was executed in 1858 by being blown from a cannon in
Sialkot. Wagner had the skull examined at the
Natural History Museum in London, who confirmed its likely authenticity. Subsequently, with no known descendants of Bheg and with no official documents mentioning him, Wagner pieced together the story of the skull using letters written by the relatives and friends of Bheg's victims, in addition to other primary material in England and India.
The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 was completed and published in 2017. Wagner later expressed a wish for the skull to be repatriated back to India to be "buried in a respectful manner". With the book, Wagner aimed to dispel what he saw as myths about the massacre. The book was highly commended by the journalists
Sathnam Sanghera Both Grundy and
Ferdinand Mount compared Wagner's book on the massacre with
The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day (2011) by
Nick Lloyd and with
Nigel Collett's
The Butcher of Amritsar (2005). While Wagner emphasised that it was "brutality" in general that was the "driving principle of the Raj" rather than the personality of individuals, ==Selected publications ==