Book

«Tony Judt – Historiador e Intelectual Público» by Rui Bebiano

Edições 70 | 2017

Abstract

By observing the biography and the work of the British historian Tony Judt (1948-2010), Rui Bebiano analyses some of the transformations related to the place and the role of the public intellectual, from the end of World War II until the present time. The book confronts the possibility or the necessity of history coming together, as knowledge and as representation, with the great mutations of political and cultural nature and with the dilemmas and options that these always raise or produce. Particularly, when they occur in more recent periods and when they intersect with choices whose echoes remain. Concerning the intervention and writing of Tony Judt, the author emphasizes and validates the place, the work and the necessity of the «public historian», re-equating the very concept of history in the light of the intervention in the contemporaneity.

 

About the author

Rui Bebiano is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the Faculty of Arts and Researcher at the Center of Social Studies, at University of Coimbra, Portugal. He has taught undergraduate and post-graduate courses in the areas of Modern and Contemporary Political and Cultural History. He has published extensively in academic journals, dictionaries of History - História de Portugal and História Militar de Portugal, both published by Círculo de Leitores - and other academic publications. He has also published opinion articles and reviews in newspapers and magazines since 1971.

Since the 1980's he has been taking part in new renewal of the Barroque Studies in Portugal, having written D. João V. Poder e Espectáculo (D. João V. Power and Display), soon to be republished. He took a Phd on History of Ideas and his dissertation - A Pena de Marte. Discurso da guerra em Portugal e na Europa entre os séculos XVI e XVIII / Mars' pen: The Discourse of War in Portugal and in Europe between the XVI and the XVIIIth Centuries - was the recipient of the Prémio de Defesa Nacional / National defense Award in the following year.

He has also done work on the areas of the History of Reading and Ciberculture, having edited between 1996 and 2002 one of the first e-zines in Portuguese. Folhas Voláteis (2001) was the first ever volume of chronicles originally published on the web. His current research and teaching areas are political and cultural history since the 1950's, particularly representations of Utopia, social exclusions and contemporary representations of the past.

O Poder da Imaginação. Juventude, Rebeldia e Resistência nos Anos 60 / The Power of Imagination. Youth, rebellion and Resistance in the 1960's was published in 2003. Anos Inquietos. Vozes do Movimento Estudantil em Coimbra (1961-1974) / Restless Years. Voices of the Coimbra Students' Movement (1961-1974) (co-authorship with Manuela Cruzeiro) and Do Activismo à Indiferença. Movimentos Estudantis em Coimbra /From Activism to Indifference (co-authorship with Elísio Estanque) came out in 2007. Another book is Outubro/ October, about the 1917 Revolution imaginary. Tony Judt - historiador e intelectual público is about to come out. He has a monthly column in LER, a cultural and literary magazine, is a member of the Editorial Board of several publications and supervises many MA and PhD dissertations.