Ben Partridge

• History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University
• Email: b.partridge@newcastle.ac.uk

The Entangled sites of Memory: The Significance of Photography for the Contentious Movements of May 1968 and June 1936: The thesis explores the photography of two major strike movements in French history, both of which have attained ‘iconic’ status and both of which produced substantial and diverse photographic records. The central aim of the thesis is to analyse these images, drawn from archives, exhibitions, digitised and printed collections, and examine their relationship to the collective memories and historiographical narratives of the strike movements. In particular, it analyses the entanglements and commonalities between the photographic representations of the two movements. The thesis approaches this corpus on several different levels: through particular photographers or exhibitions, through discrete themes and as individual photographs. It provides an analysis of diverse body of sources, some of which have been extensively used and re-used, and others that are less well known. How the preservation and presentation of the images links to the historiography of the events they depict is one of the main areas of enquiry. The thesis places the images within contemporary historiographical debates and highlights the value of a comparative approach informed by methodical innovations, such as entangled and transnational history.

Supervisory Team: Dr Matt Perry, History, Classics and Archaeology (Newcastle), Dr Sarah Leahy, Modern Languages (Newcastle).

Start Date: September 2015.