Position: Senior Lecturer
School and/or Centres: School of History
Email: ben.mercer@anu.edu.au
Phone: (02) 612 52714
Location: Level 6, RSSS Building, 146 Ellery Crescent
Researcher profile: https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/persons/ben-mercer
Ben Mercer graduated from the University of Western Australia with honours and an MA in History before completing his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2009 to 2014, he taught at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.
My intellectual interests centre upon the history of Western Europe in the era after the Second World War. My research has focused in particular on the history of the 1960s in France, West Germany and Italy, and the student revolts which peaked in 1968. I am particularly interested in the relationship between different forms of social, political and cultural change, including the history of reading, consumerism, the history of the university, of ideas and practices of democracy, as well as the representation and appropriation of the past for political purposes.
My current research project, Democratisation and its Discontents, is a transnational analysis of the student protest movements in 1968 in France, West Germany and Italy.
'Specters of Fascism: The Rhetoric of Historical Analogy in 1968', Journal of Modern History, forthcoming.
'Europe's 'Dark Age' and its Long Shadow', in Nicholas Doumanis, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Early Twentieth-Century Europe (forthcoming).
'The Moral Rearmament of France: Pierre Nora, Memory and the Crises of Republicanism', French Politics, Culture & Society, 31(2) Summer 2013, pp.102-116.
'The Paperback Revolution: Mass-circulation Books and the Cultural Origins of 1968 in Western Europe', Journal of the History of Ideas, 72(4), October 2011, pp.613-636.