Dr Ben Mercer

I graduated from the University of Western Australia with honours and an MA in History before completing my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. Before ANU, I taught at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. 

PhD. University of Pennsylvania

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 and 1970s in France, West Germany and Italy, in particular the student revolts which peaked in 1968 and the history of political violence in the subsequent decade. 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.