Paul Ginsborg (1945–2022)

ABSTRACT

Paul Ginsborg was an academic historian, public intellectual and grass-roots political activist. He began his academic career at Queens College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate in 1963 and as a Research Fellow from 1968 to 1971, where he completed a doctoral thesis on Daniele Manin and the Venetian revolution of 1848–1849. He became a lecturer at the University of York in 1972 but relinquished this position to teach temporarily in Milan and Turin before returning to Cambridge in 1980 as a fellow of Churchill College and Lecturer in Politics as part of the Cambridge Social and Political Sciences Committee, later promoted to Reader. In 1991 Ginsborg was appointed Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Florence where he remained until (official) retirement in 2015. He was an editor of Passato e Presente from 1993 to 2002 and was a founder member of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy; at the time of his death in May 2022 he was its honorary president.

RIASSUNTO

Paul Ginsborg fu uno storico accademico, un pubblico intellettuale e attivista politico di base. Iniziò la sua carriera accademica al Queens College di Cambridge, come studente universitario nel 1963 e come Research Fellow nel 1968–1971, dove completò una tesi di dottorato su Daniele Manin e la rivoluzione veneziana del 1848–1849. Nel 1972 diventa docente all’Università di York, ma lascia questa posizione per insegnare temporaneamente a Milano e a Torino, per poi tornare a Cambridge nel 1980 come fellow del Churchill College e docente in Scienze politiche nell’ambito del Cambridge Social and Political Sciences Committee, poi promosso a Reader. Nel 1991 Ginsborg viene nominato professore di Storia dell’Europa contemporanea all’Università di Firenze, dove rimane fino al pensionamento (ufficiale) nel 2015. Fu membro della direzion di Passato e Presente dal 1993 al 2002 e membro fondatore dell’Associazione per lo Studio dell’Italia Moderna, di cui era presidente onorario al momento della sua morte, nel maggio 2022.

KEYWORDS:

• Paul Ginsborg
• Italy
• Risorgimento
• contemporary history

PAROLE CHIAVE:

• Paul Ginsborg
• Italia
• Risorgimento
• storia contemporanea

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Kate Ferris is Professor of Modern European History at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on Italy and Spain under dictatorial rule with an emphasis on everyday life history and associated questions of agency, practice, subjectivity and space. Her publications include Everyday Life in Fascist Venice (2021) and (co-edited) The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy (2017) and she is currently PI of the ERC-funded research project, ‘Dictatorship as experience: a comparative history of everyday life and the ‘lived experience’ of dictatorship in Mediterranean Europe, 1922–1975’.

Notes

^1. The remainder of this paragraph and parts of the following paragraph were first published as part of my review of Family Politics published on H-Italy in July 2015. The terms of the creative commons license allow for author re-use of the material. For the full review, see: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43326