Eric Zolov, PhD Stony Brook University – Eric Zolov is Professor of History and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Stony Brook University. He received his BA from Colby College (1987), and MA in International Relations/Latin American Studies (1990) and PhD in History (1995) from the University of Chicago. The author of The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties (2020) and Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counter culture (1999), he has published widely on popular culture, twentieth-century Mexico, and U.S.-Latin American relations. His more recent book, co-authored with Terri Gordon-Zolov, is The Walls of Santiago: Social Revolution and Political Aesthetics in Contemporary Chile (Berghahn).

Summary of the Public Lecture

In recent years, the field known as the Global 1960s has expanded dramatically both in terms of theoretical conceptualization and realms of knowledge. Using the lens of the Global 1960s, scholars are working across disciplinary perspectives to interpret local change within a transnational framework, one constituted by multiple crosscurrents of geopolitical, ideological,cultural, and economic forces. Such forces produced a simultaneity of ‘like’ responses across disparate geographical contexts, suggesting interlocking causes.Yet at the same time, the distinctiveness of regional and national trajectories underscores the necessity of sustained intellectual dialogue across area studies and of the continued relevance of comparative history. This presentation provides an overview of the state of the field with a focus on the intellectual contributions from Latin America. Moreover, it seeks to initiate a wider conversation about the location of Ethiopian youth politics during the “long 1960s” both in comparison to Latin America and within the conceptual framework of the Global 1960s more generally.