Investigating the sixties at a sixties institution: teaching as historiography

This article considers historical approaches to the sixties over the last thirty years, and argues in favour of an integrative transnational and thematic approach to the period. Rather than a conventional survey of historiography, it anchors its analysis in an account of teaching practice at a particular university, itself founded in the sixties. It considers the relationship between emerging research perspectives and teaching, taking into account biographical trajectories, institutional influences and constraints. By re-locating historical practice and perspectives in the ‘everyday’ encounters between researchers, students and institutions, it seeks to demonstrate how historians can connect with and historicize contemporary concerns.