Michael Mulvey

Ph.D. Student
mulvey@email.unc.edu

 Major Field: Modern European History

Other Fields: Women's and Gender History/Global History

Advisor: Donald Reid and Lloyd Kramer

Dissertation Title, "Living Happily in Concrete: Mental Malady, Suburbaphobia, and
Territorial Politics in Parisian Housing Estates, 1954-1981".

My dissertation explores France's suburban grands ensembles or housing estates-futuristic
communities of sun drenched rows of concrete towers in pastureland-from their
construction in the 1950s to the 1981 suburban riots when President François Mitterrand
proposed tearing them all down and re-urbanizing residents. I reveal how gendered
perceptions affected material realties in housing estates, attributed meaning to a built
environment, and framed how the State responded to impoverished ethnic minorities. My
history offers new explanations for the denigration of a housing style, the flight of
French families from estates, and the source of contemporary French territorial politics
which attributes poverty to spatial exclusion rather than racial or religious
discrimination.

I have received generous support for my dissertation research from the French Republic,
The Center for Social History of the 20th Century: Paris-1, The Center for European
Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, and The Council for European Studies at Columbia University.

My research interests also include: desire and housing, subversive heterophilia in
late-nineteenth and twentieth century France, progressive/discriminatory comedy in the
United Kingdom and France, and postwar Franco-German relations.

Please visit my personal website at
http://www.unc.edu/~mulvey/MichaelJMulvey/Home.html