Patrick Joyce

Patrick Joyce is a British social historian, who has also worked on political history. He is also known for his theoretical work on the nature of history, especially on the relationship between history and the social sciences. He has consistently challenged academic orthodoxies, and been a radical voice in successive debates about the direction of social and cultural history since the 1970s. While his research has ranged widely from the politics of class in Victorian England to the formation of the modern self, it has always shown a preoccupation with liberalism, governance and the nature of freedom. Although his work has concentrated on Britain, its influence has registered worldwide, not only in Britain and North America.
He was born in Paddington, London in 1945, the child of Irish rural immigrants. He was educated in a West London secondary modern school, and worked after leaving school early, before studying history and English literature at the University of Keele. He did his graduate work in history at Balliol College Oxford. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Manchester, and has been appointed to numerous visiting professorships in history and sociology, including at the University of California, Berkeley and San Diego; the London School of Economics; and the European University Institute in Florence.

Books

• Joint ed., with T Bennett, Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (Routledge, 2010).
• Special issue: joint editor, with T Bennett and F Dodsworth, “Liberalisms,
• Government, Culture”, Cultural Studies, 21:4-5, Sept 2007, 525-778.
• The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (Verso, 2003), translated into Greek and Chinese editions.
• (Ed.), The Social in Question : New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, (Routledge, 2002).
• (Ed.), The Oxford Reader on Class, (Oxford University Press, 1995).
• Democratic Subjects: the Self and the Social in Nineteenth-century England (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
• Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848-1914 (CUP, 1991).
• (Ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work, (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
• Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Harvester Press, Brighton, 1980).

Articles, chapters

• " What is the social in social history? ", Past and Present, Feb., 2010.
• "History: Great Britain: 1815 to their Present", Encyclopædia Britannica, current edition.
• "The gift of the past: towards a critical history" in K. Jenkins, et al. (eds), Manifestos for History (Routledge, 2007).
• “A Post-modern Historian: Interview with Patrick Joyce”, Historiography Quarterly, 2:2003 (University of Shanghai Press, in Chinese).
• “More secondary modern than postmodern”, Rethinking History, 5:3, Dec.2001.
• “The return of history : postmodernism and the politics of academic history in Britain”, Past and Present, no 158, Feb 1998 207-235.
• "The end of social history?", Social History, 20:1, Jan. 1995, 73-91.
• "History and post-modernism", Past and Present, 133, Nov. 1991.
• "Work", chapter in Cambridge Social History of Great Britain, 1750–1950, vol.II (3 vols.), ed. F.M.L. Thompson (Cambridge University Press, 1990).

A number of these articles have been extensively anthologised in various readers on the nature of contemporary history, and post-modernism and history.