Biography
Laura Lee Downs is Professor of History at the European University Institute and Principal Investigator on the ERC Advanced Grant project “Social Politics in European Borderlands, 1870s-1990s: A Comparative and Transnational History.” She is the author of Manufacturing Inequality: Gender division in the French and British metalworking industries, 1914-1939 (1995), which won the Pinckney Prize for the best book in French History written by a North American; Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-class movements and the colonies de vacances in France, 1880-1960 (2002); Writing Gender History (2nd edition, revised and expanded, Bloomsbury, 2010); Histoire des colonies de vacances de 1880 à nos jours (Paris, 2009); and, with Stéphane Gerson, Why France? American Historians Reflect on their Enduring Fascination (2006).
Her most recent publications include “Could a different approach to the history of European welfare lead us to tell a different history of Europe? A tale of cross-national collaborations,” in Sonja Levsen and Jörg Requate, eds., Why Europe, Which Europe? A debate on contemporary European history as a field of research. Special issue of Hypotheses https://europedebate.hypotheses.org/ November 2020 ; “Il était une fois…La démobilisation féminine, 1918-1919,” L’Humanité-Dimanche, 24-30 janvier 2019, 76-81 ; 'La piu’ serena italianizzazione?' Social action and nationalist politics in the North-eastern Adriatic borderlands (1919-1954), Acta Histriae 26/4 (December 2018), 1087-1102; « Quand les enfants des classes populaires devenaient ceux qui restent dans la ville pendant les grandes vacances d’été », Fondation jean Jaurès, Penser pour agir (6 juillet 2018) ; « Au revoir les enfants : Wartime evacuation and the politics of childhood in France and Britain, 1939-1945, » History Workshop Journal 81/2 (fall 2016), 1-39; ‘And so we transform a people’: Women’s Social Action and the Reconfiguration of Politics on the French Right, 1934-1947 », Past and Present, November 2014, 1-39.