Collecting Postwar London: The City In The Archive

<p>This course is designed to help US students interpret London’s modern history through the city’s archives, collections, and galleries. From 1945 to the turn of the century, London has morphed from being the capital of an imperial superpower, to the heart of a fragile postwar social democracy, to its current position as the international headquarters of global finance. With these three epochs came new migrant populations, the rise and fall of state institutions, and a shifting urban landscape where the maligned urban planning of the welfare state was superseded by the luxury architecture of the free market. With a number of thematic seminars and London’s unparalleled archives and galleries to search for evidence, <em>Collecting Postwar London </em>attempts to look for the people, places, and practices that define half a century of national history by looking at the specific and the marginal. The course also has a secondary focus on the relationships between collections and cultural institutions. Students visit several galleries and meet the curators working with collections bringing these stories to life for the public, which shape the mode of assessment for the course.</p>