AHRC Grant for Four Year Project

From 10 October 2014

UCL SSEES in collaboration with the Universities of Exeter, Oxford, Columbia, Leipzig and Belgrade, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has been awarded a major AHRC Grant (2014-18)...

The grant will be used to address the relationship between what were once called the ‘Second World’ (from the Soviet Union to the GDR) and the ‘Third World’ (from Latin America to Africa to Asia).

Entitled “Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections Between the ‘Second’ and ‘Third Worlds’ 1945-1991”, the UCL SSEES bid was led by Kristin Roth-Ey.

Seven academics, two postdoctoral fellows and two PhDs will address both how socialist states in Europe crafted a global role for themselves in the post-war period, and how these international engagements reshaped socialist politics, societies and cultures ‘back home’. In doing so, it seeks to provide new insights into the circulation of ideas during the Cold War and to explore ‘the socialist world’ as a dynamic hub of global interactions during the second half of the twentieth century.  

UCL SSEES will host one postdoctoral fellow and one PhD  as well as a major international conference in 2015-2016.  Other project activities include a BBC Radio Four series and an international film festival co-sponsored with the British Film Institute.  

The project will be launched at its first conference in November:  “Alternative Encounters: The ‘Second World’ and the ‘Global South’, 1945-1991” at the Imre Kertész Kolleg, Jena, Germany on 3-4 November 2014.

Details of the conference