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My undergraduate studies drew me to the topic of social and cultural change in West Germany. My doctoral dissertation investigated university students’ protest activities from the beginning of the Federal Republic’s foundation in 1949 until 1965, and challenged the common assumption that a climate of apathy prevailed among university campuses in these years. Students of various political leanings effected change — both on and off the campus — by confronting legacies of National Socialism, defending free speech and other civil liberties, and collaborating with politically engaged African and Asian peers. In these and other activities, student campaigners confronted many of the illiberal practices and attitudes which persisted in the early years of West German democracy, although the protesters’ aims, methods, and blind spots also reveal how longer-standing, conservative norms continued to inform students’ thinking.

In my new position as Research Associate on the AHRC project ‘Global Socio-Economic Rights, Local Contexts’, I am delighted to move into the transnational history of labour and policy-making. My research on the project examines how understandings of work-related rights have evolved in Britain and Germany, particularly in the period between 1945 and 1973. During these years, welfare provisions expanded within the distinct political frameworks of the United Kingdom, West Germany’s ‘social market economy’, and the socialist regime in East Germany. Together with the project’s principal investigator, Julia Moses, I will explore the activities of the individuals and organisations who claimed entitlement to particular working rights, identify the vocabularies with which they articulated these claims, and will assess the relationship between international and national discourses about social rights on work. The overall project, which also investigates the comparisons and connections between Western Europe and East Africa (Kenya and Tanzania) sheds light on the global history of work-based rights. Findings will be disseminated through