Christian Jacobs studied history in Freiburg, Martinique, Taipei and Berlin. During his masters at Freie Universität Berlin, he focused on the global history of modern and contemporary Western Europe. For his MA thesis he conducted a research project on the rise of Maoism in France in the 1960s and 1970s funded by the German Historical Institute of Paris. His current research project explores the rising importance of culture in French politics from the 1960s to the 1980s. Previously, he published on Maoism in Europe and postcolonial memory culture in Germany.

Culture —Discovering a New Political Battleground in France and the World, 1962 -1984

The PhD project analyzes the rising importance of culture in France’s political discourse between 1962 and 1984. As a first step, it explores contemporary conceptions of culture and how they changed during the period of investigation. Secondly, the project analyzes three specific political movements and their relationship to culture in-depth as case studies: the women’s movement, the anti-racism movement, and the so-called New Right. Since all the three movements were connected to people and ideas from all around the globe, the project does not look at France as a closed space but examines the importance of global developments and entanglements for the intellectual trend. Thus, the project sheds light on the influence of transnational networks and global circulation of ideas at the time and helps to understand the interplay of conceptual debates and politics.