This course will examine the dramatic events of 1968 in Europe – a year of social and political revolts, generational conflicts, and cultural activism – as well as their long-term consequences. The central focus of the course lies on Western Europe (France, West Germany, Italy) as well as on the theoretical, political and cultural backgrounds of the respective movements. The two-hour seminars will discuss primary and secondary texts as well as other sources and will also include student presentations on selected readings.

Introductory reading

• Martin Klimke/Joachim Scharloth (eds.), 1968 in Europe. A History of Protest and Activism, 1956 – 1977, New York, 2008
• Mark Kulansky, 1968. The Year that rocked the World, London, 2005
• Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes. The Short 20th Century 1914 – 1991, London, 1995
• Axel Schildt/Detlef Siegfried (eds.), Between Marx and Coca-Cola. Youth Cultures in Changing
• European Societies, 1960 – 1980, New York, 2006
• Richard Wolin, Wind from the East. French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution and the Legacy of the 1960s, Princeton, 2010
• Jeremi Suri, The Global Revolutions of 1968, New York, 2007
• Mark Kulansky, 1968. The Year that rocked the World, London, 2005
• Nick Thomas, Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany, Oxford, 2003
• Detlef Junker et. al. (eds.), 1968: The World Transformed, Cambridge, 1998
• Kristin Ross, May 68 and its Afterlives, Chicago, 2002
• Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978, London, 1990
• Arthur Marwick, The Sixties, London, 2012 [1998])
• Robert Gildea et. al., Europe’s 1968. Voices of Revolt, Oxford, 2013
• Ben Mercer, Student Revolt in 1968 (Cambridge: CUP, 2019)
• Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ‘68: Rebellion in Western Europe and Northern America, 1956 – 1976, Oxford/New York, 2007
• Timothy Scott Brown, West-Germany and the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962 – 1978, Cambridge, 2013
• Timothy Scott Brown and Andrew Lison (eds.), The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media,
• Counterculture, Revolt, Basingstoke, 2014
• Sarah Colvin and Katharina Karcher (eds.), Gender, Emancipation, and Political Violence: Rethinking the Legacy of 1968, London, 2018

The concept of neoliberalism nowadays is as ubiquitous as it is vague and ambiguous. Applied across a variety of disciplines and creating very diverse economic, cultural, social and historical terrains, neoliberalism defies a singular definition. It could stand for an economic doctrine, a distinct intellectual project and political philosophy with roots in Mt. Pèlerin Society, a set of particular policies in domestic or international environment, or even a cultural regime of everyday with specific social-cultural practices and disciplinary institutions both formal and informal. In most general historical terms, neoliberalism is widely used to describe the constellation of socio-economic and politico-cultural relations that have become status quo during the post-Keynesian era. 

This course provides an examination of how neoliberalism has recently been studied as a historical phenomenon.  It offers students an underst

anding of the different ways and means of how the problem of neoliberalism could be conceived and analysed in such different fields of research such as intellectual history of neoliberalism (from Mont Pèlerin to Globalists), expert cultures and technocratism in the West and East, the concomitant rise of neoliberalism and human rights since the 1970s, the ‘third way’ and the neoliberal reinvention of the Left, the concept of ‘consumer sovereignty’ changing the notion and practices of democracy, or the recent rise of ‘neoliberal nationalism’.  

In contrast to many other fields of historical inquiry, within the historiography of neoliberalism, the global and transnational perspective is a default position. It is only recently that the interest in local adaptations, hybrid neoliberal regimes or the wide-spread phenomenon of “neoliberalism without neoliberals” attracts greater scholarly attention. This course will focus on the European perspective tackling the rise and spread of neoliberalism in European history across the mental (Cold-War) and geographical borders. Particular attention will be paid to the parallel, but not synchronic, processes preparing the rise of neoliberalism in the liberal democratic West and in the state socialist East in the period before and after 1989.  

Each session will be composed of an introductory lecture providing historical and intellectual context and a seminar discussion based on the selected readings.

Introductory reading

• Cornel Ban, Ruling ideas: how global neoliberalism goes local (New York, NY: Oxford University Press 2016) 
• Thomas Biebricher, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism (Stanford CA: Stanford UP 2018) 
• William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, eds., Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Ruptures (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019) 
• Colin Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, UK: Polity 2011) 
• David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005) 
•  Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the College De France, 1978-1979 (New York: Palgrave and Macmillan 2008) 
• James Mark, Bogdan C. Iacob, Tobias Rupprecht, Ljubica Spaskovska, 1989: Eastern Europe and the Making of the Modern World, (Cambridge, CUP 2019) 
• Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes, The Light that Failed: How the West Won the Cold War and Lost the Peace, (London: Penguin Books 2019)  
• Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018) 
• Philipp Ther, Europe since 1989: a History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016) 
• Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (London: Verso 2019) 

In their combination of intensity and geographical extent, the 1848 revolutions were unique – at least in European history. Neither the great French Revolution of 1789, nor the July Revolution of 1830, nor the Paris Commune of 1870, nor the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 sparked a comparable trans-continental cascade. 1989 looks like a better comparator, but there is still debate about whether these uprisings can be characterised as ‘revolutions’, and in any case their impact was limited to the Warsaw Pact states. In 1848, by contrast, parallel political tumults broke out across the entire continent, from Switzerland and Portugal to Wallachia and Moldavia, from Norway, Denmark and Sweden to Palermo. This was the only truly European revolution that there has ever been.

This MPhil option revisits some of the central questions historians have asked about the continental upheaval of 1848: how do we account for the simultaneity of the revolts? Why was their rapid ascendancy followed by such a swift and effective counter-revolution? But we will also be looking at areas that are less well covered in the existing literature. We will look closely at the forms of connectivity that made the cascade of revolutions possible. The course will shift the focus of attention away from the classic theatres of revolt, such as Paris, Berlin, and Rome towards less well-known peripheral locations such as the Ionian Islands, Greece, and Wallachia and Moldavia (modern Romania). We will examine the very substantial flows of refugees triggered by the unrest, especially in the eastern Mediterranean, and the new policing techniques used to pursue and observe them. We will consider the impact of the revolutions on European politics in the post-revolutionary era and on European political thought. Finally, we will shift the boundaries of the analysis beyond Europe to those places in the wider world (eg. Australia, Ceylon, the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States) where the impact of these revolutions was also felt. 

Introductory reading:

• Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848-1851 (Cambridge, 1994)
• Dieter Dowe et al., eds., Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform (Oxford, 2001)
• Priscilla Smith Robertson, The Revolutions of 1848, a social history (Princeton, 1952)
• Michael Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (London, 2009)
• Claus Møller Jørgensen, ‘Transurban interconnectivities: an essay on the interpretation of the revolutions of 1848’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire (2012), 19:2 pp. 201-227 (readable online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13507486.2012.6629450)

Do the people living along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea have more in common with each other than with those living inland in Africa, Asia, and Europe? Since Fernand Braudel (1949), some historians have argued that we need to move away from a focus on land and place the sea at the centre of our historiographical practice. Yet this project is not without controversy – some have argued that writing Mediterranean history erases the very important differences and inequalities between people of the northern and southern shores. Even the most ardent partisans of Mediterranean history would argue that this unified space stopped to exist in the modern era, when the forces of nationalism, capitalism, and globalization destroyed the life that the people around the sea once shared.

Taking as its focus the rupture of the 19^th century, this MPhil option will explore these historiographical debates through a variety of different themes. Recent years have seen a flurry of exciting works in the field of Mediterranean history that have revisited the Mediterranean as a category of historical analysis. By looking at a region that is often portrayed as a contact zone between different cultures, we will develop a critical look at the division between ‘European’ and ‘World’ history. As such, the course will be helpful not only to students interested in Southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, but to any students interested in transnational history and in problems of scale, as debates over the Mediterranean have influenced the history of other maritime spaces. 

Each two-hour session will draw on select historiographical case-studies from around the Mediterranean basin, accompanied by student presentations on supplementary readings. This combination will give students a broad view of the space around the sea, moving from the straits of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal, stopping in cities, from Tunis to Salonica, on islands, in straits, on ships and into people’s homes. The final session will allow students to present their work in progress on their essays and to open up discussion on contemporary dynamics in both academic and geopolitical constructions of the Mediterranean.

Introductory reading:

• Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972-73)
• Peregrine Horden and Nicolas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Blackwell, 2000)
• David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human history of the Mediterranean (Penguin, 2012)
• Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita (ed.), A Companion to Mediterranean History (Blackwell, 2014)
• William V. Harris (ed.), Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford, 2005)
• Franco Cassano, Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012)
• Roberto Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Duke University Press, 2007)
• Joanna Innes and Mark Philp, Re-Imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean, 1750-1860 (Oxford University Press, 2018)