Patrick Joyce (historian)
Patrick Joyce is a British social historian, who has also worked on political history. He is also known for his theoretical work on the nature of history, especially on the relationship between history and the social sciences. He has consistently challenged academic orthodoxies, and been a radical voice in successive debates about the direction of social and cultural history since the 1970s. While his research has ranged widely from the politics of class in Victorian England to the formation of the modern self, it has always shown a preoccupation with liberalism, governance and the nature of freedom . Although his work has concentrated on Britain, its influence has registered worldwide, not only in Britain and North America. Biography:-. Personal life. He was born in Paddington, London in 1945, the child of Irish rural immigrants from Mayo and Wexford. He was educated in a West London secondary modern school, and worked after leaving school early, before studying history and English literature at the University of Keele. He did his graduate work in history at Balliol College Oxford. He is married to Rosaleen Malone Joyce, author of Outdoor Learning Past and Present (2012), and he has two children. Academic career . His purely academic work has gone through several phases. His first book, Work, Society and Politics of 1981, was an example of what was called at the time “The new social history”, inspired in part by the British Marxist historians, with whom it disagreed, and the French Annales School. It is a study of the politics and culture of the factory districts of northern, industrial England. He then helped to pioneer “the linguistic turn” in historical writing, in which attention was paid less to social structures than to the meanings attached to historical actions. Visions of the People, of 1991 , represented this phase. He then moved more deeply into the orbit of Michel Foucault’s influence in The Rule of Freedom of 2003, in particular emphasizing how liberal freedom was a means of governing people and things. An interest in material things and their operations on the workings of power is represented in several works, most notably The State of Freedom of 2014. Recent Work. Since 2014 he has turned from purely academic work to a new kind of writing which combines memoir and history. This draws deeply on his Irish immigrant background, and his experience of growing up in  postwar working class London. It is also shaped by his experience of life in the post-industrial north of England. This work is reflected in his articles in the Field Day Review, and in his Going to My Father’s House book, of 2021. This new historical type of writing is in effect a form of meditation on the societies that are forming and melting around us in the present. It lays bare the emotional force by which the past remains within and between us, and works with the sensibility of Benjamin and Sebald as part of its iteration of  the past. He also works in a similar vein on the theme of the end of the peasant order in Europe. This work, called Remembering Peasants, draws on the experience of Ireland, Poland and Italy amongst other locations. Principal publications. Articles, chapters. A number of these articles have been extensively anthologised in various readers on the nature of contemporary history, and post-modernism and history.