Eric Hobsbawm

Abstract

Eric Hobsbawm had his elementary education in Vienna, his secondary education in four schools in Vienna, Berlin and London, where he attended Marylebone Grammar School, winning a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge. He acquired a BA degree in History at Cambridge University and, after six years in the British Army (1940–46), a Cambridge PhD in 1951. He began to teach at Birkbeck College, University of London, as a lecturer in 1947, educating himself as a historian by teaching, discussions in the Historians Group of the Communist Party, exchanges with French colleagues and Mediterranean travels. He remained at Birkbeck as a Lecturer, Reader and Professor of Economic and Social History until retirement in 1982, with spells of visiting teaching at Stanford University, MIT (1967), UNAM in Mexico (1971), the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1970s) and the College de France (1982). From 1984 to 1997 he taught at the Graduate Faculty, New School of Social Research in New York. He has given occasional lectures in a variety of institutions on four continents. He is President of the Past and Present Society, the Society for the Study of Labour History and, since 2002 of Birkbeck, University of London.