Book Launch: A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age

This meeting will be held at King’s College London, room S0.03. If you wish to attend via Microsoft Teams, please email simon.sleight@kcl.ac.uk before 1 p.m. on Tuesday 26th September. If you wish to attend in person, please also email Simon with your name for security purposes. 

A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age covers the century between 1920 and 2020— an especially vital period in the history and historiography of youth. Offering focused case studies, an assessment of existing scholarship, and suggestions for future research, it furnishes a timely and provocative interpretation of the lived experience and symbolic importance of youth across the world. Tethering the micro to the macro and moving beyond the field’s conventional geographical focus on Europe and North America, the collection traces the local and individual impacts of global processes including capitalism, migration, war, imperialism, decolonization, and the climate crisis. Together, the book’s chapters highlight the unequal power relations that have shaped young lives as well as discourses of youth and the production of youth-centered studies. Taking in matters of definition and scope alongside themes including architecture and activism, colonialism and consumer culture, desires and dispositions, gender and generation, ideology and indoctrination, learning and labor, pleasure and play, and racism and resistance, the book draws together insights from leading scholars seeking to push boundaries and scout out new terrain. This volume is available in digital open access and hard copy formats.

Kristine Alexander is Canada Research Chair in Child and Youth Studies and Associate Professor of History at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, where she also directs the Institute for Child and Youth Studies. Her book Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s (University of British Columbia Press, 2017) received the Wilson Prize for transnational history and the Canadian History of Education Association Founders’ Prize. A former editor of the journal Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, she is also the author of numerous articles and chapters about agency, emotions, settler colonialism, youth organizations, and the First World War.


Simon Sleight is Reader in Urban History, Historical Youth Cultures, and Australian History at King’s College London. He is author of Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 (Routledge, 2013; republished in 2016), and co-editor of Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and History, Memory and Public Life: The Past in the Present (Routledge, 2018). Further research and writing embraces histories of urban youth gangs, processions, dress, experience, walking, working childhoods, and the morphology of cities. Simon is also the Co-founding Director of the Children’s History Society.