Dancing in the Blood: Modern Dance and European Culture on the Eve of the First World War by Edward Dickinson, professor and chair of the Department of History. The author uncovers connections between modern dance and changing gender relations and family dynamics, imperialism, racism and cultural exchanges with the wider non-European world, and new conceptions of selfhood.

Edward Ross Dickinson received his bachelor’s degree from UC Santa Cruz in 1984, his MA from Columbia University in 1985, and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1991. From 1991 to 2000 he taught at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand; from 2002 to 2007 he taught at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio; he came to UC Davis in 2007. Professor Dickinson teaches and publishes in European and world history.

Professor Dickinson’s dissertation and early publications investigated the history of social policy in modern Germany – the history of the German child welfare system, the political dynamics of social policy, reformatory education, vocational education, and social reform movements more broadly. He moved on from there to study the history of sexuality in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Central Europe, publishing articles on feminism and sexual morality, sexual radicalism, conservative Christian men's morality organizations, the comparative policing of sex crimes (in Germany, France, Italy, Britain, and Massachusetts) and a book on the social roots and political dynamics of the broader debate about sexuality in Germany, including struggles over sexual morality, public decency, population policy, venereal disease, homosexuality, and related issues. His book on modern dance in Europe and the wider world between 1900 and 1935--focusing on the politics, business, and culture of modern dance and its reception in European societies and beyond--appeared in 2017. His history of the world in the long twentieth century (1850 to the present) was published in 2018; it presents an interpretive framework for understanding the past 150 years of world history.  He is currently working on a book on the nature and teaching of the discipline of history.

View the book at Cambridge University Press