Upcoming international conferences on cycling history

At the end of May there will be two interesting but unfortunately partly overlapping international conferences devoted to cycling history. In itself this can be considered as a welcome sign of the times, indicating the growing interest in the topic. One conference is the 22nd version of  the International Cycling History Conferences organised since 1990. This year it is held in Paris, 25-29 May, with Sorbonne professor of history Catherine Bertho-Lavenir acting as one of the hosts. The other  conference is a public workshop in Munich, 27-29 May, sponsored by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and devoted to Re/Cycling Histories. Among the international group of scholars convening in Munich are Iain Boal, author of an upcoming world history of cycling, Paul Rosen, writer of an historical analysis of the Raleigh company, Anne-Katrin Ebert, who wrote a comparative historical analysis of German and Dutch cycling history up  to 1940, and, again, Catherine Bertho-Lavenir, who  has published on the history of  bicycle tourism. Manuel  Stoffers will present at both conferences a paper on the Human Powered Vehicle movement and its contribution to the breaking up of the image of cycling as an obsolete mode of transport, showing among other things the picture above, of an HPV speeding with 50 mph along a Californian highway, 1980. Other contributions will deal with cycling in Africa, China, Finland, Sweden and Lithuania.