Fellow, SCAS.
Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies, Newcastle University

ABSTRACT:
This talk will examine left and right-wing transnational political and cultural activism during the Trente Glorieuses (1945-1975) at the Cité international universitaire de Paris, a residential campus built in the spirit of international humanism in the wake of World War I. In this thirty-year period, the Cité U was more than a simple dormitory: it came to represent and act as a hub of the global life of the city, an early locus of global migration, and a new model of global education. This interdisciplinary project brings to light unexpected connections between social anthropology, postcolonial studies, and global and cultural history and offers a new window onto the post-war and post-colonial moment. France’s Global University ultimately shows how a hybrid groups of migrants led to the production of novel orders of knowledge, fields of action and cultural imaginaries of the mid-century.