Paul Ginsborg (1945-2022)

Paul Ginsborg was the most influential British historian of Italy of his generation. He was well known not only to fellow historians but to general readers of history. Greatly admired by his many undergraduate and postgraduate students in the UK and Italy, he influenced numerous others who learned about the history of modern and contemporary Italy from his books. For several generations of researchers, he was a model historian: an immensely knowledgeable scholar who engaged with the present as passionately as he did with the past, a mentor and guide of unusual sympathy and humanity, a researcher who always sought to connect the micro and the macro, a committed activist who looked at society and politics from below. Paul’s research and teaching stretched way beyond Italian history and Italian studies. In Cambridge he taught a path-breaking ‘Revolutions’ course which took a comparative, often theoretical and what would today be called a ‘Global history’ perspective, as well as teaching French and Italian politics. His research was often comparative and trans-national, and increasingly so, as with his analytical Italy and its Discontents (2001) and his later major work on the family, in addition to a book-length study of 1968 and the 1970s and global alternatives to the family, which he was working on when he died.

Decadence, Literature, and Society · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography