On the 10th December 2020, The IHR celebrated the publication of Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s, with an online panel event with the editors and a panel of experts in the field. Together they, and some of the other contributors to the volume, commented on the book.

Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s is edited by Miles Taylor (Professor of History, University of York) and Jill Pellew (Senior Research Fellow, IHR).

In a remarkable decade of public investment in higher education, some 200 new university campuses were established worldwide between 1961 and 1970. Utopian Universities offers a comparative and connective global history of these institutions, illustrating how their establishment, intellectual output and pedagogical experimentation sheds light on the social and cultural typography of the long 1960s.

Speakers:

  • Professor Sir Rick Trainor (Rector, Exeter College, Oxford, former Principal King's College, London)- Chair
  • Professor Heike Jons (Loughborough University, Founder & Leader of the HistGeogUni network)
  • Dr Joanna Newman (Secretary General, Association of Commonwealth Universities)
  • Professor Sir Chris Husbands (Vice-Chancellor, Sheffield Hallam University, former Director of the Institute of Education, London) 
  • Emily Drewe, Editorial Director for History at Bloomsbury

Cover photo © Douglas Miller/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

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