Wednesday, October 19, 2005, 4:00PM
Lowell Lecture Hall [map]
Eric Hobsbawm
"Why America's Hegemony Differs from Britain's Empire"

Eric Hobsbawm is one of the great historians of the 20th century. His main concerns have been the rise of modern capitalism and the transformations of the world since the end of the European Middle Ages. His work ranges from detailed studies of social movements to broad but incisive syntheses of economic and political history.

Professor Hobsbawm was born June 9, 1917, in Alexandria, Egypt, to British and Austrian parents, and spent his childhood in Vienna. In the summer of 1931 he moved to Berlin and there, over the next two years, witnessed the collapse of the Weimar Republic. He moved to London in April, 1933, received a B.A. in History from the University of Cambridge in 1939, and was called to service in the British Army in 1940, where he served six years.

In 1951 he received his Ph.D. from Cambridge. From 1947 to 1982 he was Lecturer, Reader, and from 1971, Professor of (Economic and Social) History at Birkbeck College, University of London. After retirement from Birkbeck, of which he became President in 2002, he held a chair at the New School for Social Research from 1984 to 1997. Additionally, he has held positions at Stanford, MIT, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Cornell University, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the Collège de France, and has given lectures around the world.

Other than a 1948 anthology of primary sources, Professor Hobsbawm's first book was Primitive Rebels in 1959, a study of "pre-political" forms of protest in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the same year, under the pseudonym "Francis Newton," he published The Jazz Scene, a collection of jazz criticism. His major trilogy on the "long nineteenth century" began with The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848, in 1962. The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, followed in 1975 and 1987, respectively. His history of the "short twentieth century," The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991, was published in 1994 and translated into 36 languages. Among his other works are Bandits (1968), Captain Swing: The English Farm-Labourers' Rising of 1830 (1969), Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (1984), and Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (1990).

Another of his important academic contributions is The Invention of Tradition (1982), an anthology of essays concerning the manufacture of national folklore and the uses of the past. He extended this approach in his 1990 study, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. His autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, appeared in 2002.

Professor Hobsbawm has received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Stockholm, Chicago, East Anglia, Pisa, Essex, Buenos Aires, Torino, and Oxford; as well as the New School for Social Research, Bard College, York University, Columbia, the Universidad Artes y Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de la Republica in Uruguay, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Foreign Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Foreign Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, and an Honorary Member of the Japan Academy. He was made a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 1993, and a Companion of Honour in the United Kingdom in 1998. In 1996 he was awarded the Brazilian Order of the Southern Cross, and in 2002 the Gold Medal of Honour of the City of Vienna. Among his other prizes are the Premio Viareggio, the Lionel Gelber Prize, the Victor Adler Staatspreis, the Wolfson Foundation Prize for History, the Premio di Storia Cherasco, the Leipziger Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung, the Ernst Bloch Preis, and the Balzan Prize for the history of Europe since 1900.

Professor Hobsbawm lives in London with his wife, Marlene.