Patrick Joyce

Patrick Joyce is a British social historian, who has also worked on political history. He is also known for his theoretical work on the nature of history, especially on the relationship between history and the social sciences. He has consistently challenged academic orthodoxies, and been a radical voice in successive debates about the direction of social and cultural history since the 1970s. While his research has ranged widely from the politics of class in Victorian England to the formation of the modern self, it has always shown a preoccupation with liberalism, governance and the nature of freedom. Although his work has concentrated on Britain, its influence has registered worldwide, not only in Britain and North America. He was born in Paddington, London in 1945, the child of Irish rural immigrants. He was educated in a West London secondary modern school, and worked after leaving school early, before studying history and English literature at the University of Keele. He did his graduate work in history at Balliol College Oxford. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Manchester, and has been appointed to numerous visiting professorships in history and sociology, including at the University of California, Berkeley and San Diego; the London School of Economics; and the European University Institute in Florence. Continue Reading »

The above description is from the Wikipedia article on Patrick Joyce, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0. A full list of contributors can be found here.