Michael Goebel 2018-2021

Professor Michael Goebel was the first holder of the Pierre du Bois Chair. Prior to joining the Institute in 2018, Michael Goebel was Associate Professor of Global History at Freie Universität Berlin. His latest book, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015.  The book examines the relationship between nationalist movements and their leaders many of whom spent their intellectually formative years in European centers. An interview about the book can be viewed here. Additionally, the book won the Jerry Bentley Prize in World History from the American Historical Association in 2016.

Michael Goebel began as an intellectual historian of Latin America, but he has grown increasingly interested in the intersection of global and urban history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In July 2014 he received his Habilitation in Modern History. In 2012–13 he was a John F. Kennedy Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University and in 2008–11 Marie Curie Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. The latter led to his first book titled Argentina’s Partisan Past: Nationalism and the Politics of History published in 2011 by Liverpool University Press.

His articles on the history of migration and the global history of nationalism have appeared in journals such as The American Historical Review, Past and Present, and Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Additionally, Professor Michael Goebel is a co-founder of the Global Urban History blog.

To learn more about the three public lectures below organised by Michael Goebel at the Geneva Graduate Institute, click here.

• The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution: Europe and America, 19 June 2020, by David Bell
• Disclosing The Problem of Empire in the International Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois,
   12 APRIL 2021, by Adom Getachew
• Project Europe: A History, 12 October 2020, by Kiran Klaus Patel

Monographs

Anti-Imperial Metropolis: The Politics of Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans in Interwar Paris (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). (Winner of the Jerry Bentley Prize in World History, 2016, American Historical Association) (…translated into French as: Paris, capitale du tiers monde: comment est née la révolution anticoloniale[Paris: La Découverte, 2017].)

Overlapping Geographies of Belonging: Migrations, Regions, and Nations in the Western South Atlantic (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 2013).

Argentina’s Partisan Past: Nationalism and the Politics of History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011). (…translated into Spanish as: La Argentina partida: Nacionalismos y políticas de la historia [Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2013].)

Edited Volume

(with Nicola Foote), Immigration and National Identities in Latin America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014).

Journal Articles (Selection)

“Spokesmen, Spies, and Spouses: Anticolonialism, Surveillance, and Intimacy in Interwar France.” Journal of Modern History (forthcoming).

“‘The Capital of the Men Without a Country’: Migrants and Anticolonialism in Interwar Paris.” The American Historical Review 121, no. 5 (2016): 1444–1467.

“Geopolitics, Transnational Solidarity, or Diaspora Nationalism? The Global Career of M.N. Roy, 1915–1930.” European Review of History 21, no. 4 (2015): 485–499.

“Una biografía entre espacios: M.N. Roy, del nacionalismo indio al comunismo mexicano.” Historia Mexicana 62, no. 4 (2013): 1457–1493.

“Von der hispanidad zum Pan-Arabismus: Globale Verflechtungen in Argentiniens Nationalismen.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 37, no. 4 (2011): 523–558.

“Gauchos, Gringos and Gallegos: The Assimilation of Italian and Spanish Immigrants in the Making of Modern Uruguay.” Past and Present, no. 208 (2010): 191–229.

“Globalization and Nationalism in Latin America, c.1750-1950.” New Global Studies 3 (2009).

“Decentring the German Spirit: The Weimar Republic’s Cultural Relations with Latin America.” Journal of Contemporary History 44, no. 2 (2009): 221–245.

“A Movement from Right to Left in Argentine Nationalism? The Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista and Tacuara as Stages of Militancy.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26, no. 3 (2007): 356–377.

Articles in Edited Books

“Settler Colonialism in Postcolonial Latin America,” in: The Routledge Handbook of the Global History of Settler Colonialism, ed. Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini (London: Routledge, 2017), 139–151.

“Fighting and Working in the Metropole: The Nationalizing Effects of WWI Throughout the French Empire, 1916–1930,” in: The World During the First World War, ed. Helmut Bley (Essen: Klartext, 2014), 99–109.

“Reconceptualizing Diasporas and National Identities in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1850–1950,” in: Immigration and National Identities in Latin America, ed. Nicola Foote and Michael Goebel (Gainesville: University Press of Florida: 2014), 1–27.

“Italian Fascism and Diasporic Nationalisms in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay,” in: Immigration and National Identities in Latin America, ed. Nicola Foote and Michael Goebel (Gainesville: University Press of Florida: 2014), 235–255.

Encyclopedia Entries (Selection)

“Immigration and National Identity in Latin America, 1870–1930,” in: The Oxford Research Encyclopedia on Latin American History (2016) (onlinesource)

(with María Inés Tato), “Making Sense of the War (Latin America),” in: 1914-1918 Online (2015).

Full Curriculum Vitae

Classes & Events

May 2020 Michael Goebel contributed to the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy’s commentary series that looks at democratic experiences in the age of pandemics. The contribution is titled “Pandemic and political geographies.” The contribution can be found here.

November 7, 2019 Michael Goebel presented a paper titled “International Movements, the Law, and Anticolonialism: Expert Activists against Empire in Interwar Paris” at the “The Emergence of a ‘Science of the International’ in Interwar Europe: Its Origin, Development and Legacy for Contemporary Social Science” conference. The full conference program can be found here.

October 10, 2019 Michael Goebel discussed the documentary Paris, Capitale du tiers-monde de Juliette SENIK at the airing at Cinéma Les Lobis, Cycle Cinéma. More can be read about the film and discussion here.

Published in September of 2019, Michael Goebel wrote a review of Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa, by Kathleen Keller. The review can be read here.

Published in July of 2019, Michael Goebel wrote a review of Global History, Globally, eds. Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier. The review can be read here.

At the end of July 2019 Michael Goebel participated in a conference at LSE titled “Global Social History: Class and Social Transformation in World History.” He spoke on “Density and Differentiation: Cities in Global Social History.” The program of the event can be found here.

In the middle of July 2019 Michael Goebel participated in a conference at University of Leicester titled “The Pursuit of Global Urban History: A Dialogue Between Two Fields.” He spoke on “Urban Patchworks: Ethnic Segregation in the Global South’s Port Cities During the Age of Steam.” The program of the event can be found here.

In June 2019 Michael Goebel gave a talk at University of Lisbon titled “Historians and the City: The Prospects and Pitfalls of a Global Urban History.”

Michael Goebel published an article in the Journal of Modern History, entitled “Spokesmen, Spies, and Spouses: Anticolonialism, Surveillance, and Intimacy in Interwar France.” The article can be found here.

Michael Goebel published an article (in Spanish) about Latin American students in interwar Paris, who later became leading proponents of the Third World idea. The introduction and table of contents of the edited volume (ed. Martín Bergel), in which the article appeared, can be found here.

Tuesday 26 March 2019 Professor Goebel gave a lunch lecture at the Graduate Institute titled: Is Nationalism Contagious? Please read his interview here.

Tuesday 26 February 2019 Professor Goebel gave the opening spring lecture to The International History Forum at the Graduate Institute titled: After Empire: Technology, Nation-States, and Imperial Breakup

Spring of 2021

Professor Michael Goebel taught two courses at the Graduate Institute, one titled Europe and the World: Ninteenth- and Twentieth-Century Histories and the other titled Histories of Migration: From the North Atlantic to the Global Turn.

Spring of 2020

Professor Michael Goebel taught two courses at the Graduate Institute, “Nationalism: A Global Career” and the other on “Global Cities in History”.

Autumn of 2019

Professor Michael Goebel taught two courses at the Graduate Institute, one on “Approaches to Global History” and the other on “Empire and Anti-Imperialism in Latin American”.

Spring of 2019

Professor Michael Goebel taught two courses at the Graduate Institute, one on the Histories of Migration: From the North Atlantic to the Global Turn and the other on The Imperial Republic: France and the World, 1870-1960.

Autumn of 2018

Professor Michael Goebel taught two courses at the Graduate Institute, one titled Nationalism: A Global Career and the other on Global Cities in History.