Cultural Capital, Cultural Afterlives: A Conversation with Historian Simon Ball

My interview with Simon Ball, Professor of International History and Politics at Leeds, is now available. I was keen to speak to Simon because one of his current projects is a study of the cultural afterlife of the WWII battle of El Alamein for OUP. Simon suggests that a battle can rarely have been more mythologised than El Alamein.

On the face of it, Simon’s project has a lot in common with the kind of work we do in Modern Languages and I wondered in what ways Simon’s approach might be similar or different to ours. Naturally, I was particularly interested in his treatment of cinema but we also discussed how the project fitted into his career and into his discipline. How does a hard-core international historian come to write a cultural history?

Read the interview here: Cultural Capital, Cultural Afterlives: A Conversation with Historian Simon Ball