Paul Ginsborg 1945-2022

Abstract

Paul Ginsborg was an academic historian, public intellectual and grass-roots political activist. He began his academic career at Queens College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate in 1963 and as a Research Fellow from 1968 to 1971, where he completed a doctoral thesis on Daniele Manin and the Venetian revolution of 1848–1849. He became a lecturer at the University of York in 1972 but relinquished this position to teach temporarily in Milan and Turin before returning to Cambridge in 1980 as a fellow of Churchill College and Lecturer in Politics as part of the Cambridge Social and Political Sciences Committee, later promoted to Reader. In 1991 Ginsborg was appointed Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Florence where he remained until (official) retirement in 2015. He was an editor of Passato e Presente from 1993 to 2002 and was a founder member of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy; at the time of his death in May 2022 he was its honorary president.