Guy Ortolano

Prospective graduate students are urged to visit the website of the New York-Cambridge Training Collaboration (NYCTC). With Susan Pedersen of Columbia and Peter Mandler of Cambridge, Ortolano founded and runs this collaborative approach to graduate training in British history between Cambridge, Columbia, and NYU.Guy Ortolano is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern Britain, with interests in urban history and the history of science. He edits the Oxford journal Twentieth Century British History and, with Susan Pedersen of Columbia and Peter Mandler of Cambridge, runs the New York – Cambridge Training Collaboration for PhD students in modern British history (NYCTC). He teaches surveys of British and European history since the eighteenth century, and seminars on urban history, the practice of history, and the history of science. He also offers a survey of multi-ethnic Britain since pre-Roman times for NYU’s Core Curriculum. Ortolano writes about subjects that recently enjoyed wide acclaim, only to have fallen dramatically out of favor: a novelist no longer in print, a literary critic out of fashion, an architecture widely loathed. By recovering the context in which these reputations once thrived, his work challenges some of the most pervasive interpretations of the post-1945 era, from economic “decline” to the 1970s “crisis.” His first book, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge, 2009), explains how a cliché about intellectual life – that it is divided between “two cultures,” the humanities and sciences – ignited a ferocious debate during the 1960s, as this familiar lament became invested with competing readings of England’s past, the West’s present, and Africa’s future. His second book, Thatcher's Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town (Cambridge, 2019), follows the Prime Minister on a driving tour through the planned city of Milton Keynes - a journey that reveals a dynamic welfare state during the decade of its purported crisis. Ortolano is now working on the ways that British history has figured in conceptions of world history since David Hume; a first installment, on British history and American modernization theory, was named winner of the Walter D. Love Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. You can read an interview about that article here.

Guy Ortolano is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern Britain, with interests in urban history and the history of science. He edits the Oxford journal Twentieth Century British History and, with Susan Pedersen of Columbia and Peter Mandler of Cambridge, runs the New York – Cambridge Training Collaboration for PhD students in modern British history (NYCTC). He teaches surveys of British and European history since the eighteenth century, and seminars on urban history, the practice of history, and the history of science. He also offers a survey of multi-ethnic Britain since pre-Roman times for NYU’s Core Curriculum. Ortolano writes about subjects that recently enjoyed wide acclaim, only to have fallen dramatically out of favor: a novelist no longer in print, a literary critic out of fashion, an architecture widely loathed. By recovering the context in which these reputations once thrived, his work challenges some of the most pervasive interpretations of the post-1945 era, from economic “decline” to the 1970s “crisis.” His first book, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge, 2009), explains how a cliché about intellectual life – that it is divided between “two cultures,” the humanities and sciences – ignited a ferocious debate during the 1960s, as this familiar lament became invested with competing readings of England’s past, the West’s present, and Africa’s future. His second book, Thatcher's Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town (Cambridge, 2019), follows the Prime Minister on a driving tour through the planned city of Milton Keynes - a journey that reveals a dynamic welfare state during the decade of its purported crisis. Ortolano is now working on the ways that British history has figured in conceptions of world history since David Hume; a first installment, on British history and American modernization theory, was named winner of the Walter D. Love Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. You can read an interview about that article here.

Guy Ortolano is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern Britain, with interests in urban history and the history of science. He edits the Oxford journal Twentieth Century British History and, with Susan Pedersen of Columbia and Peter Mandler of Cambridge, runs the New York – Cambridge Training Collaboration for PhD students in modern British history (NYCTC). He teaches surveys of British and European history since the eighteenth century, and seminars on urban history, the practice of history, and the history of science. He also offers a survey of multi-ethnic Britain since pre-Roman times for NYU’s Core Curriculum. Ortolano writes about subjects that recently enjoyed wide acclaim, only to have fallen dramatically out of favor: a novelist no longer in print, a literary critic out of fashion, an architecture widely loathed. By recovering the context in which these reputations once thrived, his work challenges some of the most pervasive interpretations of the post-1945 era, from economic “decline” to the 1970s “crisis.” His first book, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge, 2009), explains how a cliché about intellectual life – that it is divided between “two cultures,” the humanities and sciences – ignited a ferocious debate during the 1960s, as this familiar lament became invested with competing readings of England’s past, the West’s present, and Africa’s future. His second book, Thatcher's Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town (Cambridge, 2019), follows the Prime Minister on a driving tour through the planned city of Milton Keynes - a journey that reveals a dynamic welfare state during the decade of its purported crisis. Ortolano is now working on the ways that British history has figured in conceptions of world history since David Hume; a first installment, on British history and American modernization theory, was named winner of the Walter D. Love Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. You can read an interview about that article here.