Were the 1960s a Revolution?
Lawrence Black, Florence Tamagne and Laura Lee Downs (Chair)

• Saturday 9 June 2018, 12.30PM to 2.00pm
• Free admission
  Booking required
  Book tickets
• UPP Foundation Marquee, King's Manor, Exhibition Square (map)
• Wheelchair accessible

Event details

From Twiggy to Mr Wilson, we discuss the Swinging 60s. Join top historians including Lawrence Black of the University of York and Florence Tamagne of the University of Lille.

Find out more about the sixties, with talks including ‘The Night of the Nation (22 June 1963): Rock and riot in France?'

The session is chaired by Laura Lee Downs of the European University Institute.

#DateHistory

French Film Screenings

Look out for a special screening of L’Homme de Rio on Monday 11 June and Merci Patron! on Thursday 14 June.

About the speakers

Lawrence Black is Professor of Modern British History and Head of the Department of History at the University of York. He specialises in the history of political culture and has research interests across the modern period. He is currently writing a study of shopping in the UK and USA since 1899. He has commented on the history of affluence, consumerism and politics on BBC TV and radio.

Lawrence’s research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and British Academy and he has been a Fellow at Harvard’s Center for European Studies and a Fulbright Visiting Professor. He is a member of the editorial board of the journals Twentieth Century British History and Contemporary British History. Lawrence joined York in 2012 having taught at the Universities of Bristol and Durham in the UK, and Duke and American University in the USA.

Laura Lee Downs is Professor of Gender History at the European University Institute (EUI). Her research explores the shifting relationships between the social and the political in 20th-century Europe via the comparative study of civil society mobilisations around social welfare in Italy, France and Great Britain from the 1870s to the late 1970s. Her current book project, tentatively titled La piu serena italianizzazione?' Social action, nationalist politics and gender in Europe’s Northeastern Adriatic borderlands, 1890-1978, analyses the intensive labour of civil society associations in the never-ending campaign to ‘Italianise’ Slovenian/Croatian speaking and mixed language families on Italy’s Balkanic frontiers from the end of the 19th century through WWI, fascism and on into the first three decades of Italy’s First Republic. These associations offer a critical vantage point for understanding how a distant state functions in its furthermost regions, as they all played a ‘state-like’ role in this region, delivering vital socio-medical and nursery school services in lieu of the Italian state, which never managed to organise much of anything on this front before the 1970s.

This research has given rise to a European research network ‘The Quest for Welfare and Democracy’, which developed out of a series of workshops that Laura organised at the EUI in 2014 and 2015. The network brings together some 50 scholars from across Europe in a series of individual and collective projects that are inspired by a single, shared conviction: that the story of European welfare states is rooted in deeper, more long-term and local histories that are populated by activists and reformers whose names rarely appear in standard histories of the welfare state.

Florence Tamagne is Associate Professor at the University of Lille, specialising in the history of gender and sexuality. Her books include History of Homosexuality in Europe, Berlin, London, Paris, 1919-1939, Mauvais Genre? A History of Representations of Homosexuality and The Crime of The Palace. Investigation on One of the Most Famous Criminal Affairs of the 1930s in France (Prize Augustin-Thierry for the best book in contemporary History, 2017). She’s currently working on a project devoted to ‘Youth Culture, Rock Music and Politics. Britain, France and Germany 1950s-1970s’.

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