New Books in French Studies

Aurore Spiers, "Archiving the Past: Women's Film History in France, 1927–1978" (U California Press, 2026)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

What happens when we assume women’s presence in film history instead of their absence? This is the question at the heart of Archiving the Past: Women’s Film History in France, 1927–1978, the newest addition to the Feminist Media Histories book series at the University of California Press.

The first book by Aurore Spiers, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Texas A&M University, Archiving the Past is a fascinating account of some of the many women in France whose labor had a decisive role in the formation of cinema history across the twentieth century. Aurore shows that the film-historical archive has always been a site of feminist agency and power, even if women’s work in and around the archive has been diminished, interrupted, erased, or ignored.

In this conversation with fellow feminist film scholar Alix Beeston, Aurore shares about the historical, methodological, and political stakes of her work, from the archive to the classroom. She describes her process for discerning the traces of women’s archival labor, however fleeting, contingent, or speculative they may be. She reflects on how gendered ideas and norms have defined—and limited—our sense of what counts as film-historical labor. And she ruminates on what it means for feminist scholars, in and beyond film and media studies, to collect and recollect the past—for the sake of the feminist present and its still-possible futures.

Alix Beeston is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at Cardiff University. She's the author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford UP, 2018) and the co-editor of the award-winning volume Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023).

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Penny Roberts, "Huguenot Networks: Truth and Secrecy in Sixteenth-Century Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Huguenot Networks: Truth and Secrecy in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge UP, 2025), Penny Robert's latest book, takes us into the world of secret intelligence gathering during the French Wars of Religion. Robert's discovery of the interrogation record of a Huguenot merchant, Jean Tivinat, arrested in May 1570 for attempting to secretly carry letters to England, unspools into a broader story about the intersections between confessional affiliations, international affairs, knowledge, trust, and networking in a tumultuous time. As she argues, clandestine communication was crucial to maintaining ties amongst a widely dispersed and threatened religious community. Huguenot Networks is a lively read and sure to appeal to anyone interested in the history of espionage, Huguenots, international affairs in Elizabethan England, or the French Wars of Religion.

Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.

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Andrew W. M. Smith, "Make Cheese Not War: Transnational Resistance and the Larzac in Modern France" (Manchester UP, 2026)

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In 1971, the French government announced a massive extension of its military base on the Larzac plateau in southern France. Land was to be expropriated from 107 farms around the small town of La Cavalerie. Limited resistance was expected, but what happened next exceeded all expectations.

Local sheep farmers set up protest camps and occupied the land. They soon attracted an astonishing level of support, pioneering a form of regional radicalism with global implications. Drawing out the international dimensions of the protest, Make cheese not war: Transnational resistance and the Larzac in modern France (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Andrew Smith explores a transnational resistance movement in the 1970s that challenged dominant visions of modernity and became a wellspring of radical alternatives. Exploring previously unconsulted archives in France and elsewhere, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the decade-long peasant movement and its aftermath.

Repositioning the Larzac struggle within a wider network of French and international solidarities, from the US to the UK, Germany, Burkina Faso, New Caledonia and Japan, the book retraces political networks of pacifist activism, as well as environmental movements and anti-nuclear protest. It shows how this French peasant campaign became both a platform and a model for popular engagement.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Leslie Barnes, "Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film (Edinburgh UP, 2025), Leslie Barnes examines the ambivalences that mark Southeast Asian sex industries under global imperialism. She explores the multi-layered subjectivities of sex workers, procurers and clients, and interrogates the frameworks in which discourses surrounding sex work circulate. Engaged with debates concerning the status of transactional sex, Sex Work in Southeast Asia explores the symbolic force and concrete conditions of sex work in Cambodia and Vietnam, considering how these debates and the figures they ensnare are mediated by fiction and creative nonfiction. The book’s scenes of ambivalence show how the aesthetic treatment of sex work stretches the paradigms we use to make sense not only of sex work, but also of art, the evidentiary status of testimony and the spectacles of pleasure and suffering. Contesting essentialism and authenticity, and working to suspend judgement, these scenes encourage a re-examination of what we think we know about sex work, how we know it and what we do with that knowledge.

Leslie Barnes is an Associate Professor of French Studies at the Australian National University. She is author of Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (2014) and co-editor of The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul (2021). We previously chatted on New Books about her work on the great Cambodian film director Rithy Panh, so was excited to speak with her again about Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film.

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Michaela Hulstyn, "Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – can transform the ordinary experience of selfhood.

Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness (U Toronto Press, 2022) explores the nature of disruptive self-experiences and the different shapes they have taken in literary writing. The book focuses on the tension between rival conceptions of unselfing as either a form of productive self-transcendence or a form of alienating self-loss.

Michaela Hulstyn explores the shapes and meanings of unselfing through the framework of the global French literary world, encompassing texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium alongside writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. Together these diverse texts prompt a re-evaluation of the consequences of the loss or the transcendence of the self. Through a series of close readings, Hulstyn offers a new account of the ethical questions raised by altered states and shows how philosophies of empathy can be tested against and often challenged by literary works. Drawing on cognitive science and phenomenology, Unselfing provides a new methodology for approaching texts that give shape to the fringes of conscious experience.

Guest Dr. Michaela Hulstyn is Associate Director of the Structured Liberal Education Program at Stanford University. Her research interests include philosophy and Literature; 20c and 21c French and Francophone African thought, cognitive approaches to aesthetics; global phenomenology; intermediality; decolonization; narrative. In addition to her monograph, she has published articles related to a number of these topics in forums such as Modern Fiction Studies, Philosophy and Literature, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites.
Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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Marta Lorimer, "Europe As Ideological Resource: European Integration and Far Right Legitimation in France and Italy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

How did the far right go from illegitimate fringe to contender for public office, and did Europe have anything to do with it? Europe As Ideological Resource: European Integration and Far Right Legitimation in France and Italy (Oxford UP, 2024) argues that European integration functioned as an ideological resource for far right parties looking for legitimation because it enabled them to refashion their political message in a more acceptable form, while maintaining the allegiance of their existing supporters.
Drawing on the qualitative analysis of over 400 documents produced by the Movimento Sociale Italiano/Alleanza Nazionale in Italy (1978-2009) and the Rassemblement National in France (1978-2019), Lorimer identifies the core concepts and discourses the parties used to talk about Europe, and the legitimation mechanisms associated with them. The book's narrative is developed through the analysis of four key concepts: the concept of identity, which enabled the parties to transnationalise their message and create a positive association between themselves and Europe; the concept of liberty, which made it possible for them to foster an image of actors holding uncontroversial positions; the concept of threat, which helped them promote the idea that 'desperate times call for desperate measures; and the concept of national interest, which helped them stress commitment to core principles in their ideology.
Ever since its re-emergence on the European political scene, scholars have sought to explain the mainstreaming of the far right. By understanding how the process of European integration facilitated its transition from the margins to the mainstream, this book adds one piece to the puzzle of far right legitimation.

Marta Lorimer is a Lecturer in Politics at the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University, where she teaches on European politics and populism, and co-editor of the journal Political Research Exchange. Her research on far-right politics and European integration has been published widely, including in the Journal of European Public Policy and the Journal of Common Market Studies.

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The Club: Where American Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Belle Époque Paris, the Eiffel Tower was newly built, France was experiencing remarkable political stability, and American women were painting the town and gathering at a female-only Residence known as The American Girls' Club in Paris. Opened in 1893, The Club was the center of expatriate living and of dedication to a calling in the fine arts, and singularly harbored a generation of independent, talented, and driven American women.
Now in The Club: Where American Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris (Bloomsbury, 2025), curator, art historian, and podcast host Jennifer Dasal presents the untold story of the Club, the philanthropists who created it, and the artists it housed. These women forged connections in the arts and letters with luminaries like Auguste Rodin and Gertrude Stein or became activists through their relationships with the likes of Emmeline Pankhurst. But just as importantly, these women's lives revealed the power of the Club itself, and the way that having a safe home for single women of ambition allowed them to grow as teachers, artists, suffragists, and people.

A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life

Our guest is: Jennifer Dasal, who is the creator and host of the ArtCurious podcast, the author of ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History. She holds an MA in art history, and is the former curator of modern and contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She lectures frequently on art both locally and nationally

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Claire Goldstein, "Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France" (Northwestern UP, 2025)

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France (Northwestern University Press 2025) explores the relationship between sensory experience, state ideology, and artistic form, examining literature and art inspired by comets that unsettled the heliocentric order to which French politics and culture aspired.

Guest Claire Goldstein Professor of French and Director of the Humanities Program at UC Davis. Her research in ancien régime French-language literature and culture has explored subjects such as garden design, art and architecture; theater, ballet, and fête performances; astronomy; early modern fashion accessories; and early journalism. Claire’s current projects include Jesuit school ballets; female itinerant clothing resellers; and the innovative and enterprising publishing practices of Nicholas de Blégny, a best-selling and long forgotten multi-hyphenate physician-author. Her scholarship is motivated by her abiding interests in visual and material culture, her curiosity about how the things people see, and the objects and material practices that they engage with, create cultural meanings. She is the author of In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth Century France (Northwestern UP, 2025) and Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures, and Accidents That Made Modern France (U Penn Press, 2007).

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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Michael Bycroft, "Gems and the New Science: Matter and Value in the Scientific Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Gems and the New Science: Matter and Value in the Scientific Revolution (U Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Michael Bycroft argues that gems were connected to major developments in the “new science” between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. As he explains, precious and semiprecious stones were at the center of dramatic shifts in natural knowledge in early modern Europe. They were used to investigate luminescence, electricity, combustion, chemical composition, and more. They were collected by naturalists; measured by mathematicians; and rubbed, burned, and dissolved by experimental philosophers. This led to the demise of the traditional way of classifying gems—which grouped them by transparency, color, and locality—and the turn to density, refraction, chemistry, and crystallography as more reliable guides for sorting these substances.

The science of gems shows that material evaluation was as important as material production in the history of science. It also shows the value of seeing science as the product of the interaction between different material worlds. The book begins by bringing these insights to bear on five themes of the Scientific Revolution. Each of the subsequent chapters deals with a major episode in early modern science, from the expansion of natural history in the sixteenth century to the emergence of applied science early in the nineteenth century. This important work is not only the first book-length history of the science of gems but also a fresh interpretation of the Scientific Revolution and an argument for using a new form of materialism to understand the evolution of science.

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Maud Anne Bracke, "Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Feminism, Contraception, and Abortion, 1950-1980 (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The introduction of the principle of women's reproductive liberty in France, tentatively by the family planning movement after 1960 and explicitly by the women's liberation movement after 1970, marked a deep shift, transforming public discourses. Yet this principle remained fiercely contested, and moderate and conservative actors responded by foregrounding notions of 'reproductive responsibility', or the expectation that individuals perform the 'right' sexual and family-making behaviour, benefiting not only themselves and their families, but the nation at large. Such responsibilisation underpinned the legal reforms of the 1960s-70s, framing a notion of reproductive citizenship based on a tension between individual rights and social norms. Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Feminism, Contraception, and Abortion, 1950-1980 (Oxford UP, 2025) breaks new ground by taking an intersectional approach to the defining moments of this period: the legalisation of contraception (the laws of 1967 and 1974) and the liberalisation of abortion (1975, 1979). Drawing on a wide range of sources and actors - including feminist and family planning movements, government actors, demographers, medical-professional organisations, disability rights groups, and key actors in the overseas departments - Maud Bracke demonstrates how the discourse of responsibilisation allowed actors to distinguish between citizens 'worthy' of reproductive rights and those seen as less worthy. Bracke analyses the distinct regulations regarding contraception in the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, framed by racialised anti-natalism. The book also demonstrates that disability rights organisations contributed to the discrediting of the notion of 'eugenic abortion', used among experts and policy-makers until the early 1970s. Furthermore, Bracke goes on to highlight the silence in the feminist movement around both disability rights and race as part of its universalisation of women's conditions of oppression, and analyses the emergence of Black Feminism in late-1970s France. In so doing, the book offers a major contribution to the history of sex, gender, family life, healthcare, demography, and political debate in post-war France, and more generally.

Guest Dr. Maud Bracke is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Glasgow, and is also the author of Which Socialism? Whose Detente? West European Communism and the Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 in 2007 and Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy (1968-1983) in 2014, as well as the co-editor of Translating Feminism: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Text, Place and Agency in 2021. In addition to authoring numerous journal articles and book chapters and co-editing several special issues of academic journalsb she is also an editor at the Journal of Modern European History and sits on various other editorial boards.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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Jennifer Boum Make, "Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean" (Rutgers UP, 2025)

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean (Rutgers UP, 2025) examines the relationship between the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of caregiving that have emerged from the French Caribbean. Putting in dialogue postcolonial studies and care studies, this book elucidates how caring and uncaring have been historically shaped by colonialism and shows how media and narratives help develop decolonial approaches to care that sustain human life and livable environments.

Guest Jennifer Boum Make is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. In addition to her monograph, she has co-edited 2025’s Graphic Narratives of Resistance: Advocating for Representation and Social Justice in French-Language Bandes Dessinées. In addition to many journal articles and contributions to collected volumes, she serves on a number of editorial boards and is one of the founders of Kwazman vwa: New Paths in Caribbean literature, an online series hosting conversations with ultracontemporary Caribbean writers.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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Richard Vinen, "The Last Titans: How Churchill and De Gaulle Saved Their Nations and Transformed the World" (Simon & Schuster, 2026)

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

A compelling dual biography of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle that shines new light on two of the greatest figures of the 20th century.
Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle were thrown together by war. They incarnated the resistance of Britain and France to the existential threat from Nazi Germany, and their ultimate victory over Hitler has ensured their achievements will never be forgotten. But, as The Last Titans: How Churchill and De Gaulle Saved Their Nations and Transformed the World (Simon & Schuster, 2026) shows, that is only a part of a complex story. Both men influenced their countries, and the world around them, long after the war was won.
There was a paradox in the parallel and intertwined lives of these extraordinary men. De Gaulle—tall, gauche, and incorruptible—exhibited qualities often associated with the English. Churchill—short, charming, witty, and a bon vivant—resembled the quintessential politician of the French Third Republic. Their working relationship was rarely smooth, but they appreciated each other’s stature: de Gaulle said Churchill was “the great artist of a great history,” while Churchill recognized de Gaulle as “l'homme du destin.”
Richard Vinen explores what made these men exceptional and how profoundly they were influenced by their national cultures. Beyond personal intrigue, Vinen makes a wider point that Britain and France are both haunted by perceptions of past greatness. He retraces the paths of two leaders who once helmed superpowers but lived to see their nations weakened by two world wars and the loss of empires.
Written with extraordinary narrative verve, The Last Titans offers a fresh exploration into the lives of de Gaulle and Churchill. By bringing their two stories into one, each man is seen anew and we gain fresh insights into their achievements and their legacy today.

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E. T. Dailey, "Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

A princess born to the Thuringian royal house. A captive in war, forced to marry the Frankish king who killed her family. A queen, who renounced her position, received consecration as a deaconess, and took monastic vows. A religious leader, who acquired a fragment of the Cross of the Crucifixion for her convent of Holy Cross in Poitiers. And, lastly, a saint, remembered for her healings, exorcisms, and extreme self-mortification. Such was Radegund, a woman who lived through an era defined by headlong change. Honored as a "mother" by subsequent Frankish kings and as a holy woman by her nuns and devotees, Radegund enjoyed a reputation for righteousness that spread throughout the whole of medieval Europe, with later queens emulating her pious achievements. For generations, she defined medieval queenship, female monastic practice, and the expectations associated with holy women. Today, she is often envisioned as a pan-European saint.

Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. E. T. Dailey presents a new interpretation of this remarkable woman, examining her vibrant life and legacy. Dr. Dailey shows how she succeeded in establishing a place for herself within this difficult and dangerous world, despite the trials she faced. He also demonstrates how Radegund achieved a position of prominence as a woman in a foreign land without resorting to the violence and intrigue that characterized the lives of other prominent women during this period. Based on a wealth of English, French, and German scholarship, this book will equip experts and lay readers with a concise, authoritative, and accessible portrait of Radegund.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Veronique Boone, "Le Corbusier on Camera: The Unknown Films of Ernest Weissmann" (Birkhaüser, 2024)

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Le Corbusier on Camera: The Unknown Films of Ernest Weissmann (Birkhaüser, 2024) is based on amateur films, shot by the architect Ernest Weissmann (1903-1985) with a Pathé Motocamera in the years 1929-1933 at, among other places, the Atelier Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. These films capture moments from Le Corbusier's life that have never been seen before. It also documents his friendships with Pierre Jeanneret, Josep Lluís Sert, Charlotte Perriand, Norman Rice, Kunio Maekawa, Sigfried Giedion and others.

Across six chapters, the book shows impressive stills from these films and places them in the respective historical and personal context of Le Corbusier in introductory texts. Two introductions are devoted to the history of these pioneering amateur films and to Ernest Weissmann's life and his life-long relationship with Le Corbusier.

Veronique Boone is an architect from the University of Ghent, Belgium and doctor from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et de Paysage de Lille (ENSAPL), France and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. She is an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta at the ULB. She lectures on architectural history and theory as well as on the conservation of 20th-century architecture. Her research focuses on the history and theory, as well as the construction history, of modern architecture. She has published extensively in academic publications on Le Corbusier and the mediation of architecture by film and television, and is a correspondant for Belgian and international architectural magazines on contemporary architecture. She has worked on several exhibitions as curator and/or contributor to catalogues – among them, Lucien Hervé, l’oeil de l’architecte, CIVA, 2005; Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography, Musée des beaux-arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, 2012; L’Architecture modern à l’écran, Cinematek, 2014; In the Studio at 35, rue de Sèvres: an Amateur cameraman’s Informal View, Fondation Le Corbusier, 2017 and Atelier Jespers, 2018. She is also Vice-President of DOCOMOMO Belgium.

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Michèle Schaal, "Grrrl Writing: Virginie Despentes's Authorial Politics" (Peter Lang, 2026)

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

When Virginie Despentes (1969) published her provocative debut novel Baise-moi in 1994, no one could have anticipated how she would gradually become a literary, feminist, and punk icon. This book is the first holistic, interdisciplinary approach to Despentes's novels and evolution as an author. Using feminist, queer, literary, and punk theories, the book examines how Despentes has developed and refined her Grrrl writing in Baise-moi, Les Chiennes savantes, and Les Jolies choses. Michèle Schaal's Grrrl Writing: Virginie Despentes's Authorial Politics (Peter Lang, 2026) specifically illustrates how her unique authorial politics, infused with punk, genre- and genderbending praxes, have provided an acerbic critique of still largely heteropatriarchal French society. Despentes's Grrrl writing denounces how this system engenders and thrives on injustice and social inequities, but also how conventions at play in classic or populist literary genres can perpetuate oppression as well

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Andrea Mansker, "Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell UP, 2024) gives an historical account of the evolution of the matchmaking business during the Second Empire in France. The book explores how the matchmaking industry at the Postrevolutionary France was shaped by commodified stories of hope and fantasy, including democratization of the matchmaking business, which aroused the interest of democratized French audience, including lower-middle-class individuals, through exaggerated advertisements in the media productions. The book also gives an exposition on the period of French Revolution and how it significantly altered family legislation and marriage practices, leading to increased freedom in spouse selection and the rise of professional matchmakers like Claude Viome. The book highlights how the revolutionary reforms impact on marriage of the French populace, including the age reduction policy for the majority and lifting of parental consent for marriage, as well as introducing divorce by mutual consent in 1792.

According to Andrea Mansker, the changes in age and divorce policy, combined with increased mobility and changing social patterns in Paris, encouraged young people across classes to demand more freedom in spouse selection, leading Claude Viome to market his services as a way to bypass traditional family negotiations in courtship. The book relates the1804 Civil Code, explaining how it preserved revolutionary reforms like equality before the law but restored traditional family structures by treating married women and children as legal minors under their husband's authority. It exposes how divorce became less common and eventually outlawed in 1816, and detailed the French Supreme Court's 1855 ruling against matchmaker contracts, which viewed marriage as a sacred agreement distinct from commercial transactions.

Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links @ | LinkedIn here | ORCID here | Meta here |

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Sally Frances Low, "Colonial Law Making: Cambodia Under the French" (NUS Press, 2023)

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In 1863 the French established a protectorate over the kingdom of Cambodia. The protectorate, along with Vietnam and Laos, later became part of the colonial state of French Indochina. Part of the French ‘civilizing mission’ in Cambodia involved reforming Cambodian law and legal processes.

Sally Low’s pioneering study, Colonial Law Making: Cambodia under the French (NUS Press, 2023), tells the story of the encounter between what she calls two different legal and social ‘cosmologies’: Cambodia’s indigenous legal tradition and modern French legal thinking. While the French claimed they were modernizing Cambodian law, in fact they imposed many elements of French law. Initially, they dispossessed the king of much of his judicial authority. But ironically, the French reform of Cambodian law retained the monarchy as the semi-divine source of law, and royal power was subsequently legally embedded into new national institutions, the law, and the constitutions. At independence in 1953, 90 years after the French began their protectorate, Cambodia’s King Sihanouk inherited this legal apparatus which had done so much to enhance the power of the executive over the judiciary.

Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au.

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Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India.

The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways.

Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Harvard UP, 2026) illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building.

This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.

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Claire Nicolas, "Une si longue course: Sport, genre, et citoyenneté au Ghana et en Côte d’Ivoire (années 1900-1970)" (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024)

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Today we are joined by Claire Nicolas, a chercheuse du Fonds National Suisse at Basel University, a holder of a prestigious Ambizione Research Grant, and the author of Une si longue course: Sport, genre, et citoyenneté au Ghana et en Côte d’Ivoire (années 1900-1970) (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024). In our conversation, we discussed physical culture in colonial and post-colonial Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, the differences and the similarities between the imperial and post-imperial biopolitical strategies in both places, and the way that sports histories benefit from sustained engagement with critical theory.

In Une si longue course, Nicolas engages in a sustained comparison between the colonial and post-colonial physical cultural life of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana. She organizes her work into two sections: one on colonial West Africa and another on post-colonial West Africa. Each section has three chapters covering physical education, scouting and sports. Her work addresses athletic life from the top down and the bottom up. In doing so, she shows that contrary to any simple history of teleological progress or sport as a crucible for nationalism, physical education, scouting and sport have been imperfect tools for imperial and post-imperial states. Athletes, scouts, and students found innovative ways to reshape the physical cultural priorities of the state to suit their own agendas.

This deeply ambitious work significantly adds to our understanding of physical culture in colonial and post-colonial West Africa through a comparative approach. It draws upon extensive primary source research: Nicolas works in the archives of the British and French colonial states, the ministries of post-colonial Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, and the repositories of international sporting organizations in Switzerland. She also relies upon oral histories conducted with Ghanaian and Ivoirian sportsmen and women.

Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Great Britain, and France: their physical cultural programmes shared continuities and ruptures. Colonial empires concerned with the mise en valeur of their subjects sought biopolitical solutions to increase the birthrate, expand agricultural and industrial production, and prepare men for the defence of the empire. They worried that physical cultural programs – if poorly managed – would become sites for resistance, but Nicolas’ work shows that sporting clubs, scouting halls, and schools could confound any simple collaboration/resistance dichotomy.

Nicolas’ work also demonstrates the deeply gendered nature of both colonial and post-colonial physical culture. Newly emergent post-colonial nations sought to produce new men (and women) in ways that replicated the essentialism of their imperial predecessors.

Nicolas’ engaging work, thoroughly researched, and beautifully presented will be of broad interest to people invested in British, French, and West African history. It has broader conclusions for people interested in colonial and post-colonial theory.

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Cindy Anh Nguyen, "Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam" (U California Press, 2026)

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Libraries in French colonial Vietnam functioned as symbols of Western modernity and infrastructures of colonial knowledge. Yet Vietnamese readers pursued alternative uses of the library that exceeded imperial intentions. In Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam (U California Press, 2026), Cindy Any Nguyen examines the Hanoi and Saigon state libraries in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam, uncovering the emergence of a colonial public who reimagined the political meaning and social space of the library through public critique and day-to-day practice. Comprising government bureaucrats, library personnel, journalists, and everyday library readers, this colonial public debated the role of libraries as educational resource, civilizing instrument, and literary heritage.

Moving beyond procolonial or anticolonial nationalism framings, Bibliotactics advances a relational theory of power that centers public reading culture contextualized within the library infrastructure of the colonial information order. As the first comprehensive history of the colonial and national library in Asia, this book contributes new insights into publicity, colonial and postcolonial studies, and the histories of Vietnam, libraries, and information.

Bibliotactics is available open access from Luminosa. Visit here to download a copy for free.

Cindy Anh Nguyen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies and the Digital Humanities program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).

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Olivier Esteves et al., "France, You Love It but Leave It: The Silent Flight of French Muslims" (Polity, 2025)

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Their names are Mohamed, Samira, sometimes Matthieu or Sophie. They were born and bred in France and are highly qualified, but they have decided to go and live in London or New York, Montreal or Brussels, Geneva or Dubai. Many were discriminated against on the French job market, or stigmatized simply because of their religion or the sound of their names. Whether devout or not, they felt unloved and unwanted in France, but abroad they have found a sense of peace and fulfilment that their native country failed to give them.
Based on extensive original research, France, You Love It but Leave It: The Silent Flight of French Muslims (Polity, 2025) by Dr. Olivier Esteves, Dr. Alice Picard, and Dr. Julien Talpin sheds new light on the silent and largely unacknowledged flight abroad of French Muslims. It explores their motivations, their experiences in France and abroad, and their sense of Frenchness, torn between gratitude and bitterness. This book isn't just about an unreported brain-drain - it is also about the deleterious effects of Islamophobia in a country that balks at the very mention of the concept. And it highlights a pressing issue that many nations with Muslim minorities need to confront.

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164 Maurice Samuels: Jewish Assimilation, Integration and the Dreyfus Affair (JP)

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And yet when things seemed to be going well for Jews in Western Europe and North America generally and France especially, the infamous fin de siècle Dreyfus affair brought to the surface some of the worst kinds of bigotry and animus--like contemporaneous Russian pogroms a premonition of the deadly looming revival of ethnic or religious divisions that had seemed a thing of the past.

Our guest today, historian Maurice Samuels, author of many fine books on French history (Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2010), and The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016))and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has written a crackerjack new book. Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, (Yale 2024) has written a wonderful account of Dreyfus himself and how should we understand what that turmoil has ot tell us how Jews then (and perhaps today) coexisted with a mainstream secular Christian society either by way of assimilation or (not quite the same thing) by peaceful integration that preserved cultural distinctions.

The discussion ranges widely, setting the scene in the prior centuries when Jews settled all over France, and then were accorded unusual rights by the universalist vision of the French Revolution. Maurie also explains why succeeding generations in France included the ascension not only of Leon Blum the Jewish socialist (and inventor of the weekend!) who improbably led anti-fascist France during in the 1930's--but also the other Jews who followed him as political leaders in France, right up to the present-day.

From Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) forward, Maurie shows, intellectuals have missed the significance of the way Dreyfus and his family integrated without assimilating. The conversation culminating in Maurie introducing John to the fascinating "Franco-French War" about what that coexistence should look like: assimilation which presumes the disappearance of a distinctive Jewish cultural identity, or integration which posits the peaceful coexistence of French citizens of various religions and cultures.

Mentioned in the episode

Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (1844)
George Eliot's (perhaps philosemitic) Daniel Deronda (1876)
Why does Yale have a Hebrew motto, אורים ותומים (light and perfection)?
The Haitian Revolution in its triumphs and tribulations is an analogy that helps explain jewish Emancipation--and also in some ways a tragic counterexample.
The horrifying Great Replacement Theory we have heard so much about in America (eg in Charlottesville in 2017) began in France; Maurie has some thoughts about that.
Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair.
America's racial "one drop" rule.
Pierre Birnbaum, Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (Yale, 2015)
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.

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Andrew Billing, "Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-century Liberal Political Writing" (Routledge, 2023)

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-century Liberal Political Writing: Political Zoologies of the French Enlightenment (Routledge, 2024) shows how our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Michèle Duchet and others have shown, French Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophical anthropology to support new political norms and models. This book explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authors—Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and Rétif de La Bretonne—also constructed a "political zoology" in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida, Latour, de Fontenay, and others, it shows how these five authors signed on to the old rhetorical tradition of animal comparisons in political philosophy, which they renewed via the findings and speculations of contemporary science. Engaging with recent scholarship on Enlightenment political thought, it also explores the links between their political zoologies and their family resemblance as "liberal" political thinkers.

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Jacqueline Couti and Anny Dominique Curtius, "Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings (Liverpool UP, 2025) bridges the gap between the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It collectively fosters new transoceanic modes of thinking to reframe postcolonial debates and reveal the interconnected dialogues led by women from former French colonies and post-contact island territories. Thus, the volume unsettles the male agenda (captains, missionaries, mariners, ethnographers), and pays attention to the ways in which artists, writers, and activists have theorized or poetized women and the seas, reclaimed agency and created transformative possibilities. To critically map out a gendered conversation with the ocean, the contributors explore activisms and feminisms, intersectional praxes of care, ecological and health impacts of nuclear radiation and chlordecone contamination, queerness, decolonizing dance, the unsettling of official archives and female tidalectical corporeality and embodiments, Mā'ohi epistemologies and ontologies, silence as empowerment against colonial violence, forced migration and vulnerability. The volume's overarching approach belongs to a "politics of refusal" which brings forth formerly discarded archives and discredited sites of knowledge to counter ideologies and doctrinal apparatus that promote forgetting or erasure among non-sovereign populations. In exploring transoceanic feminine spaces as vital sites of knowledge production, this interdisciplinary collaboration aims to ensure that readers actively engage with feminine praxes, understanding their significance not only as theoretical constructs but as lived experiences (re)occupying, (re)appropriating and transcending patriarchal and postcolonial spaces.

Jacqueline Couti is the Laurence H. Favrot Professor of French in the Department of Modern & Classical Literatures & Cultures at Rice University and the author of 2016’s Dangerous Creole Liaisons: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses from 1806 to 1897 and 2021’s Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses 1924–1948, as well as editing several critical editions and special journal issues, and authoring numerous articles and book chapters.

Anny-Dominique Curtius is Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Iowa, and has published two monographs : Symbioses d’une mémoire: Manifestations religieuses et littératures de la Caraibe in 2006 and Suzanne Césaire. Archéologie littéraire et artistique d’une mémoire empêchée in 2020. She has also co-edited a special issue of Esprit Créateur on “Francophonies of the Early Modern,” and published extensively in academic journals and edited volumes.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, "By the Power Vested in Me: How Experts Shape Same-Sex Marriage Debates" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In both the United States and France, each side of the legal battle over same-sex marriage and parenthood relied heavily on experts. Despite the similarity of issues, however, lawmakers in each country turned to different sets of authorities: from economists and psychoanalysts to priests and ordinary people. They even prized different types of expertise—empirical research in the United States versus abstract theory in France.
Exploring the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States and France, Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer sheds new light on the power of experts to influence high-stakes democratic debates. Drawing on extensive interviews and ethnographic observation, Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer traces the divergences between the two countries, showing why some experts are ubiquitous in one but absent in the other. He argues that lawmakers, judges, lawyers, journalists, and activists covet something only experts can provide: the credibility and aura of authority, or “expert capital,” which they deploy to advance their agendas. Expert capital is not derived from scientific or technical merit alone but is produced through cultural norms, material resources, and social relationships, which vary greatly across national contexts.
Through the story of the fight over gay rights, By the Power Vested in Me: How Experts Shape Same-Sex Marriage Debates (Columbia UP, 2025) reveals how and why certain experts—but not others—obtain the authority to shape public opinion and policy. At a time of soaring public distrust in experts, this book offers new ways to understand the contested political role of expertise and its consequences.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University, where he specializes in the cultural and interpretive study of space, behavior, and identity. His scholarship examines how designed environments shape social interaction, connectedness, and moral life across diverse settings. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His current research projects include the study of escape rooms as emotion-structured environments, temporal urban environments in rural historical towns, student experiences of hanging out and being at home while at college and university, and a more recent study on the making of rodeo. To learn more about his work, visit his personal website, Google Scholar profile, or connect with him on Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social) or Twitter/X (@ProfessorJohnst). He can also be reached directly by email.

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Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, "Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Today we are joined by Dr. Lindsay Krasnoff, who is an historian, specializing in global sport, communications and diplomacy. She is also the Director of FranceandUS, and she lectures on sports diplomacy at New York University Tisch Institute of Global Sport. We met to talk about her most recent book: Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA (Bloomsbury, 2023). In our conversation, we discussed the rise of basketball in France, the differences between French and American basketball, and the way that French basketball stars such as Boris Diaw exemplify the new global “empire” of basketball that incorporates Africa, France and its overseas departments, and the USA.

Krasnoff divides Basketball Empire into three parts that together investigate how French basketball developed from a low point in the middle of the 20th century to a global powerhouse contributing players to the NBA and the WNBA almost every year. Krasnoff argues that French basketball’s success hinges on their ability make use of their connections both with the United States and with their former empire. In examining the growth of basketball in France, Krasnoff traces a sporting genealogy that links together players, coaches, and even commentators from around the globe who compete together in France and help produce a distinctive French style of basketball that nevertheless has appeal outside of the hexagon.

In Basketball Empire, Krasnoff’s first section takes off from her previous work on French association football, which looked at the development of Les Bleus. In the 1950s and 1960s, French basketball too was in crisis. In response, the French government, the Fédération française de basket-ball (FFBB), and even some sporting associations sought out new ways to improve the quality of play in France. Paris University Club brought in Americans who had played basketball in the NCAA but were now living in France to teach American approaches to the game. Individual players, including one of the earliest female French basketball stars Elisabeth Riffiod, watched film of American professionals like Bill Russell. The government redeveloped a national training centre: the National Institute of Sport, Expertise, and Performance (INSEP.) The French League professionalized in 1987. Since the 1990s, French basketball has enjoyed a rising number of successful EuroBasket and Olympic campaigns, including a men’s silver and a women’s bronze in 2020/21.

Basketball Empire’s second section uses micro-biographies to explore the ways that contemporary French players developed their skills, how they made their moves into the NCAA, the NBA or the WNBA, and the challenges and opportunities that these moves provided them as players. In this section in particular, Krasnoff’s ability land and conduct interviews shines. She shows how diverse players, including Boris Diaw, Sandrine Gruda, Nicolas Batum, Marine Johannès, Diandra Tchatchouang, Evan Fournier, Mickaël Gelabale, and Rudy Gobert have become not only basketball stars but also informal diplomats that help build connections and translate between Africa, France and the United States.

In the final section, Krasnoff considers why the French have been so successful at producing high quality men’s and women’s basketball players. She credits la formation à la française: the specific French training system that includes a national sports training center (the INSEP) as well as local and regional basketball academies (pôles espoirs). The future looks bright for French basketball and in our interview Krasnoff predicts French and US success in the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympiad.

Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history.

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Susannah Wilson, "A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Susannah Wilson joins Jana Byars to talk about A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell UP, 2025). The monograph examines the death of a five-year-old girl in late nineteenth-century France, unfolding the mystery through judicial investigations, psychiatric medical evaluations, and ultimately, a trial for murder. The investigators quickly learned that the child, Henriette, had been abducted by Marie-Françoise Fiquet, an employee at the city tobacco factory and known troublemaker. Fiquet had taken the child back to her home and kept her there all day. But what actually happened between the abduction at midday and the discovery of the child's body at five o'clock in the morning remained a mystery. Susannah Wilson uses archival records, press coverage, and psychiatric reports to reveal how the troubled history and reputation of Marie-Françoise Fiquet, marked by suspicions of sexual debauchery, infanticide, abortions, poisoning, theft, and extortion, was a case study in an emerging medical paradigm. Her signs of trauma, psychological disturbance, and medical morphine abuse provide insight into factitious disorders—or simulated illnesses—that would be more commonly observed in the following century. A Most Quiet Murder provides a new view of nineteenth-century France, where the law and public authorities intervened in the lives of the working classes and their children during moments of crisis to exercise the law of the land. The murder of a child reveals the connections between the psychology of female violence, the emergent understanding of factitious disorders, and the psychologically complex motives that extend beyond simple altruism.

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Matthijs Lok, "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extolling the virtues of homelands threatened by globalised elites and mass migration.

Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past (Cambridge UP, 2023) seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the fundamental differences between the writings of the older counter-revolutionary Europeanists and their self-appointed successors and detractors in the twenty-first century. In the decades around 1800, the era of the French Revolution, counter-revolutionary authors from all over Europe defended European civilisation against the onslaught of nationalist revolutionaries, bent on the destruction of the existing order, or so they believed. In opposition to the new revolutionary world of universal and abstract principles, the counter-revolutionary publicists proclaimed the concept of a gradually developing European society and political order, founded on a set of historical and - ultimately divine - institutions that had guaranteed Europe's unique freedom, moderation, diversity, and progress since the fall of the Roman Empire. These counter-revolutionary Europeanists drew on the cosmopolitan Enlightenment and simultaneously criticized its alleged revolutionary legacy. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these ideas of European history and civilisation were rediscovered and adapted to new political contexts, shaping in manifold ways our contested idea of European history and memory until today.

Matthijs Lok, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Stuart Carroll, "Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Stuart Carroll's Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023) transforms our understanding of Europe between 1500 and 1800 by exploring how ordinary people felt about their enemies and the violence it engendered. Enmity, a state or feeling of mutual opposition or hostility, became a major social problem during the transition to modernity. He examines how people used the law, and how they characterised their enmities and expressed their sense of justice or injustice. Through the examples of early modern Italy, Germany, France and England, we see when and why everyday animosities escalated and the attempts of the state to control and even exploit the violence that ensued. This book also examines the communal and religious pressures for peace, and how notions of good neighbourliness and civil order finally worked to underpin trust in the state. Ultimately, enmity is not a relic of the past; it remains one of the greatest challenges to contemporary liberal democracy.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Matt Dawson, "The Political Durkheim: Sociology, Socialism, Legacies" (Routledge, 2023)

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Matt Dawson's The Political Durkheim: Sociology, Socialism, Legacies (Routledge, 2023) presents Durkheim as an important political sociologist, inspired by and advocating socialism. Through a series of studies, it argues that Durkheim’s normative vision, which can be called libertarian socialism, shaped his sociological critique and search for alternatives. With attention to the value of this political sociology as a means of understanding our contemporary world, the author asks us to look again at Durkheim. While Durkheim’s legacy has often emphasised the supposed conservative elements and stability advocated in his thought, we can point to a different legacy, one of a radical sociology. In dialogue with the decolonial critique, this volume also asks ‘was Durkheim white?’ and in doing so shows how, as a Jew, he experienced significant racialisation in his lifetime. A new reading and a vital image of a ‘political Durkheim’, The Political Durkheim will appeal to scholars and students with interests in Durkheim, social theory and political sociology.

Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Andrew S. Curran, "Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson" (Other Press, 2026)

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

An engaging investigation of how 13 key Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. Over the first decades of the 18th century, Christianity began to lose its grip on the story of humankind. Yet centuries of xenophobia, religious intolerance, and proto-biological ideas did not simply disappear. This raw material was increasingly “processed” by secularly minded thinkers who claimed the right to rethink the category of the human. By century’s end, naturalists and classifiers had divided the human species into racial categories using methods that we now associate with the Enlightenment era. In Biography of a Dangerous Idea, prize-winning biographer and Enlightenment specialist Andrew S. Curran retells this story through the medium of group biography. Written more like a detective story than traditional history, the book traces the emergence of race through the lives of 13 pivotal figures, among them Louis XIV, Buffon, Linnaeus, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Blumenbach, Kant, and Jefferson. Moving from the gilded halls of Versailles to the slave plantations of the Caribbean, from the court of the Mughal Empire to the drawing rooms of Monticello, this sweeping narrative not only reveals how the Enlightenment’s ultimate Promethean quest intertwined with systems of oppression and empire, but also offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the era’s most famous luminaries.

Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of New Books Network.

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Susan McCready, "Commemorative Acts: French Theatre and the Memory of the Great War" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Drawing on memory studies and theatrical history, Commemorative Acts: French Theatre and the Memory of the Great War (University of Toronto Press, 2025) analyses a neglected body of plays staged in France after the Great War, between 1918 and 1937, to reveal their profound impact on collective memory and cultural identity.

In the aftermath of the Great War, a remarkable wave of collective commemoration emerged, but the aesthetic diversity of this period has often been overshadowed by a singular focus on the combatant experience, primarily conveyed through fiction and memoir. This selective historical narrative has fostered a homogenized memory of the war, neglecting the rich array of cultural productions that also emerged alongside it. Commemorative Acts challenges these prevailing assumptions about the memory of the Great War and its literary expression in interwar France by spotlighting theatrical works that have largely been forgotten. The book uncovers how the dominance of first-person accounts of soldiers’ experiences has subtly, yet powerfully, narrowed our understanding of what the memory of the Great War can encompass. It explores how drama, structurally at odds with the first-person perspective and defined by its simultaneous modes of expression and reception, has been lost to collective memory. By examining the unique capacity of the dramatic form to capture war trauma, Commemorative Acts offers insights that differ from those of other literary genres, highlighting the theatre’s potential to provide a more expansive and nuanced understanding of interwar memorial culture.

Author Susan McCready is Professor of French at the University of South Alabama and the co-director for the Center for the Study of War and Memory at South Alabama; she is also the author of 2016’s Staging France between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon and 2007’s The Limits of Performance in the French Romantic Theatre, as well as the co-editor of Novel Stages: Drama and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France in 2007. She has also co-edited a volume of Lingua Romana on France and Memory in the Great War, and has authored many academic articles and chapters on French theater and related topics, as well as a number of public humanities projects on war and memory.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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Maddalena Alvi, "The European Art Market and the First World War: Art, Capital, and the Decline of the Collecting Class, 1910–1925" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The outbreak of the First World War shattered the established European art market. Amidst fighting, looting, confiscations, expropriation fears and political and economic upheaval, an integrated marketplace shaped by upper-class patrons broke down entirely. In its place, Maddalena Alvi argues, can be found the origins of a recognizably modern market of nationalized spheres driven by capitalist investment and speculation, yet open to wider social strata. Delving into auction records, memoirs, newspaper articles, financial and legal documents in six languages, Alvi explores these cultural and socio-economic developments across the British, French, and German markets, as well as trade spheres such as Russia and Scandinavia. 1914 marked the end of the European art market and cemented the connection between art and finance.

The European Art Market and the First World War: Art, Capital, and the Decline of the Collecting Class, 1910–1925 (Cambridge University Press, 2025)

Maddalena Alvi holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, an MSc in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford, and an MLitt in Art History from the University of Glasgow.

Priya S. Gandhi is a writer and strategist based in New York City.

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Hannah Frydman, "Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France (Cornell UP, 2025) by Dr. Hannah Frydman reveals a space, hidden in plain sight in Third Republican Paris, where deviant sexualities and lives could be experimented with and financed, despite republican attempts at growing and norming the population through the heterosexual family. That space was the newspaper, which was not simply a tool of normalization and a site of "dominant discourse," as it has frequently been imagined. Reading between the lines, Dr. Frydman shows how, through the Belle Époque classifieds, the newspaper became a tool for living lives otherwise as information flowed from it not just vertically but also laterally, facilitating person-to-person communication.

The sexual relationships, exchanges, and services enabled by this communication were far from utopian: Surviving and thriving outside of social norms often required exploiting others. Yet by attending to the lives and livelihoods enabled by the classifieds, ethical or otherwise, Between the Sheets demonstrates that, thanks to new innovations in media technologies, queer and nonnormative lives in this period were lived in the center as well as on the margins. It was this centrality, however, that inspired efforts to place new (moral) controls on mass cultural forms and technologies. After World War I, in an interwar moment often characterized as one of sexual liberation, the press's queerness was subjected to ever-increasing surveillance and control, with repercussions for press freedom writ large. These repercussions echo into our age of social media, with its promise of unfettered connection, which inspires repressive legislation to keep sexuality (and with it, freedom) in its crosshairs.

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Aubrey Gabel, "The Politics of Play: Oulipo and the Legacy of French Literary Ludics" (Northwestern UP, 2025)

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Showing the political importance of play in postwar French literature In postwar France, authors approached writing ludically, placing rules and conditions on language and on the context of composition itself. They eliminated "e's" and feminized texts; they traveled according to strict rules and invented outright silly public personas. The Politics of Play: Oulipo and the Legacy of French Literary Ludics (2025, Northwestern University Press) is a comprehensive examination of how and why French authors turned to these ludic methods to grapple with their political moment. These writers were responding to a range of historical upheavals, from the rise and fall of French feminist and Third-Worldist groups to the aftermath of international socialism both at home, in the former Parisian Belt and in France more broadly, and abroad, in post-Yugoslavia Balkan states and elsewhere. Juxtaposing an array of case studies and drawing on cross-disciplinary methodologies, Aubrey Gabel reads three generations of the formalist literary group Oulipo, including Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Jacques Jouet, alongside writers not traditionally deemed ludic--or sometimes not even conventionally known as novelists--such as the lesbian activist-writer Monique Wittig and the editor François Maspero. Gabel argues that literary ludics serve as both an authorial strategy and a political form: playful methods allow writers not only to represent history in code but also to intervene creatively--as political actors--in the fraught social fields of postwar France.

Author Aubrey Gabel is Assistant Professor of French at Columbia University, as well as an affiliate with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender (ISSG) and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), and currently a fellow with the Institute for Ideas & Imagination. She has also published a number of articles and chapters in edited volumes on literary play and constraints, but also on bande dessinée and other comic genres.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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Melissa Byrnes, "Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

“A lot of things become possible when [the nation state] is not the only framework,” Melissa Byrnes reminds us in this deeply intimate local history of North African migrants in France. In this conversation about her new book, Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon (U Nebraska Press, 2024) we learn about how questions Byrnes had about how we live with difference in our own communities brought her to this research on the suburbs of French cities in the dwindling decades of French imperialism. Focusing on four French suburbs from the 1950s to the 1970s, Byrnes examines how local officials – from mayors and city councilors to religious leaders to those operating public housing units – talked about North African migrants and the problems and opportunities of migration. In tracing the motivations of these French officials and local leaders, Byrnes examines what she calls “locally lived migration policies” to see how communities tried to make space for their neighbors against the backdrop of a national housing crisis, divergent political ideologies, and decolonization.

Melissa K. Byrnes is professor of modern European and world history at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Her research focuses on migration and activism in the context of French imperialism and decolonization and she previously coedited a volume on the colonial politics of population. Her new book, Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon, is available now from Nebraska University Press, 2023.

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Rachel Jean-Baptiste, "Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships persisted, resulting in the births of thousands of children. These children, mostly born to African women and European men, sparked significant debate in French society about the status of multiracial people, debates historians have termed 'the métis problem.'

Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research in Gabon, Republic of Congo, Senegal, and France, in Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship (Cambridge UP, 2023) Dr. Rachel Jean-Baptiste investigates the fluctuating identities of métis. Crucially, she centres claims by métis themselves to access French social and citizenship rights amidst the refusal by fathers to recognize their lineage, and in the context of changing African racial thought and practice. In this original history of race-making, belonging, and rights, Dr. Jean-Baptiste demonstrates the diverse ways in which métis individuals and collectives carved out visions of racial belonging as children and citizens in Africa, Europe, and internationally.

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Chad Augustine Córdova, "Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France" (Northwestern UP, 2025)

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

What good is aesthetics in a time of ecological crisis? Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France (Northwestern UP, 2025) shows that philosophical aesthetics contains unheeded potentialities for challenging the ontological subjection of nature to the human subject. Drawing on deconstructive, ecological, and biopolitical thought, Chad Córdova uncovers in aesthetics something irreducible to humanist metaphysics: an account of how beings emerge and are interrelated, responsive, and even response-able without reason or why.
This anarchic and atelic ontology, recovered from Kant, becomes the guiding thread for a new, premodern trajectory of posthumanism. Charting a path from Aristotle to Heidegger to today’s plant-thinking, with new readings of Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau, and others along the way, this capacious study reveals the untimely relevance of pre-1800 practices of writing, science, and art. Enacting a multitemporal mode of reading, Córdova offers a defense and illustration of the importance of returning to early modern texts as a way to rethink nature, art, ethics, and politics in a time when these concepts are in flux and more contentious than ever.

Author Chad Córdova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University where he is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Environment and Sustainability. In addition to this new book, he is the author of many articles on figures and concepts that appear in this book, such as Montaigne, Kant, and Heidegger—most recently in Essais: Revue interdisciplinaire d’humanités and The Comparitist.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama. Their research is concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean.

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Carolyn J. Eichner, "Feminism's Empire" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Feminism's Empire (Cornell UP, 2022) investigates the complex relationships between imperialisms and feminisms in the late nineteenth century and demonstrates the challenge of conceptualizing "pro-imperialist" and "anti-imperialist" as binary positions. By intellectually and spatially tracing the era's first French feminists' engagement with empire, Carolyn J. Eichner explores how feminists opposed—yet employed—approaches to empire in writing, speaking, and publishing. In differing ways, they ultimately tied forms of imperialism to gender liberation. Among the era's first anti-imperialists, French feminists were enmeshed in the hierarchies and epistemologies of empire. They likened their gender-based marginalization to imperialist oppressions. Imperialism and colonialism's gendered and sexualized racial hierarchies established categories of inclusion and exclusion that rested in both universalism and ideas of "nature" that presented colonized people with theoretical, yet impossible, paths to integration. Feminists faced similar barriers to full incorporation due to the gendered contradictions inherent in universalism. The system presumed citizenship to be male and thus positioned women as outsiders. Feminism's Empire connects this critical struggle to hierarchical power shifts in racial and national status that created uneasy linkages between French feminists and imperial authorities.

Dr. Carolyn J. Eichner about is a Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Feminism’s Empire is her third book. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune came out in 2004 and The Paris Commune: A Brief History came out in 2022. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune was published in French as Franchir les barricades: les femmes dans la Commune de Paris (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020). Translated by Bastien Craipain, it was a finalist for the Prix Augustin Thierry in 2021, an award from the city of Paris for a historical study concerning the period between Antiquity and the late 19th century. In 2022-2023 she will be a Fulbright Research scholar in France and will be in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Darcie Fontaine, "Modern France and the World" (Routledge, 2023)

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

As she taught university-level courses on modern French history, Darcie Fontaine felt like she could not find a textbook that provided an up-to-date narrative about the ways in which France has been involved in and influenced by the rest of the world—certainly not one that incorporated contributions from scholars of social and cultural history, gender studies, and the history of imperialism. So when the opportunity to develop a textbook for college professors that did just that presented itself, she decided to take the leap. Modern France and the World (Routledge, 2023) is the result of years of research, reading, and collaborative engagement with scholars in a diverse array of fields that provides readers with an engaging narrative of French history from the 18th century to the present that incorporates a consistent awareness of how France’s empire and global politics has shaped it as a nation. A useful resource for teachers, students, and scholars of modern France, the book incorporates brief discussions of cultural objects and major themes in French history that can serve as a foundation for a one- or two- semester survey, a specialized course, or even general undergraduate classes.

In this conversation, we talk not only about how she decided to take on this gargantuan task, but how she went about writing the book – gathering ideas and advice from scholars with different methodological expertise, reading widely in fields with which she was less familiar, and, eventually, whittling down all of this information into a concise text. Along the way, we discuss how collaboration, teaching, and an awareness of the influence of academic history shaped the decisions she made about what to include and what to leave out of the narrative. Fontaine demonstrates an astute awareness of the political importance and stakes of creating national narratives. As she explains: “everything about [the book] is a historiographic intervention… every choice I make about what to include, what not to include, is embedded in the historiography.”

Darcie Fontaine is a scholar of modern French imperialism, particularly in North Africa, though she has studied transnational women’s movements and refugee politics in nineteenth and twentieth century French history. Her first book, Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria was published in 2016—and was featured on an episode of New Books in French Studies! She is currently working as a developmental editor and translator at Les plumes rouges, the new company she has launched with Dr. Sandrine Sanos.

Sarah K. Miles is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who specializes in global francophone history and the history of the French Left. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (skmiles@live.unc.edu).

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Mary Edwards, "Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Thinking of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, it is hard to think of him without imagining him in very particular contexts. One will likely imagine him in a Parisian cafe working through a pack of cigarettes and coffee, working on his latest play while waiting for his friend Pierre to arrive. His theories of freedom against the temptations of bad faith are thought to be theories of writers and activists, resisters of occupation. But while this is no doubt a central part of his thinking, it misses another context he was very much interested in: the clinic. While he was not an orthodox Freudian or trained analyst, he was deeply interested in many of the questions that psychoanalysts are also interested in, and this intersection proved to be very productive, generating thousands of pages of lesser known works.

This is what Mary Edwards, philosophy lecturer at Cardiff University, has written about in her new book Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others (Bloomsbury, 2022). Working through Sartre’s output from beginning to end, it first sets the stage with his early claims about the nature of the self and the possibility of knowing a person. From there, it works to his later works, in particular his voluminous yet unfinished biography of Gustave Flaubert, where Edwards finds Sartre developing and applying a very particular method of understanding a person while nonetheless maintaining a respect for their free nature. While Sartre never completed his intended project, Edwards finds his attempt suggestive for rethinking life both in and beyond the clinic.

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Melodie H. Eichbauer, "Law in a Culture of Theology: The Use of Canon Law by Parisian Theologians, Ca. 1120-Ca. 1220" (Routledge, 2025)

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Law in a Culture of Theology: The Use of Canon Law by Parisian Theologians, ca. 1120-ca. 1220 (Routledge, 2025) considers the study of law within its intellectual environment. It demonstrates that theologians associated with the schools of Paris in the twelfth century, particularly Peter the Chanter and his circle, had a working knowledge of Romano-canonical tradition and thought about the human context of the law, which, in turn, reflected the environment in which each master worked. It begins by showing the extent to which law was woven into the fabric of the schools of Paris, and follows with individual case studies.

These case studies--marriage in Hugh of St. Victor's De Sacramentis and Peter Lombard's Sententiae, excommunication in Peter the Chanter's Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis, crusade activity and heresy in Robert of Couçon's Summa penitentiae, homicide in Robert of Flamborough's Liber poenitentialis, and the faces of greed in Thomas of Chobham's Summa confessorum--demonstrate how each theologian drew upon legal thought, for what end he was using it, and how his use of law fit into contemporary legal thinking. A competency in law proved valuable to, and was tailored for, different types of ecclesiastical roles: teachers showing students how to analytically navigate complex questions of pastoral care, papal judge-delegate on the cusp of full-time administration on behalf of the papacy, penitentiarius of St. Victor and the students at the University of Paris, or diocesan management.

This book will be a useful resource for all students and researchers interested in medieval canon law, medieval theology and pre-modern law.

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Bryan A. Banks, "Write to Return: Huguenot Refugees on the Frontiers of the French Enlightenment" (McGill-Queen's, 2024)

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes led more than 200,000 Huguenots to flee France after 1685. Many settled close to the country's frontiers, where their leaders published apologetic texts arguing for their right to return to France and be recognized as French citizens. By framing their refugee experiences intentionally, even using the term "refugee" to describe their diaspora, Huguenots profoundly influenced Enlightenment debates on citizenship and religious tolerance.

Write to Return: Huguenot Refugees on the Frontiers of the French Enlightenment (McGill-Queen's, 2024) is a cultural history of these Huguenot apologetics in which Bryan Banks examines the work of four authors: Pierre Jurieu, Pierre Bayle, Antoine Court, and Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne. Each author advanced his arguments using key ideas of the Enlightenment, appealing to reason to argue for freedom of conscience all while appealing to emotion in his descriptions of Huguenot victimhood. The authors' campaign succeeded. In 1789, France's revolutionary National Assembly granted repatriation to all expelled Huguenots, offering them citizenship regardless of place of birth or baptism, and even permitting them to reclaim ancestral lands.

International refugees played an overlooked role in shaping discourse around the nation and nationalism in the eighteenth century. Write to Return shows how early modern refugees could advocate for their interests, build international networks, and even craft a new collective identity. By presenting themselves as loyal citizens of France, Huguenots were at the forefront of constructing a French national identity.

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Julie Fette, "Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature" (Routledge, 2025)

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature (Routledge, 2025) investigates the gender representations that French children's literature transmits to readers today. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, this book grounds its literary analysis in a sociohistorical examination of three key institutions – libraries, book clubs, and subscription magazines – that circulate reading material to children. It shows how French policies, cultural beliefs, and market forces influence the content of children's literature, including tensions between State support for unprofitable artistic endeavors and a belief in children’s right to high-quality products on the one hand, and suspicion of activism as anathema to creativity and fear of losing boy readers on the other. In addition, the notion of universalism, which asserts that equality is best achieved when society is blind to differences, thwarts a diverse and equitable array of literary representations. Nevertheless, conditions are favorable for 21st-century French children's publishers to offer a robust body of richly entertaining egalitarian literature for children.

Guest Julie Fette, author of Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature published in October 2024 by Routledge. Dr. Fette is Associate Professor of French Studies at Rice University where she is also Rice Faculty Scholar at the Center for the Middle East, Baker Institute and a Faculty Affiliate with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also the author of Exclusions: Practicing Prejudice in French Law and Medicine, 1920-1945 from Cornell University Press in 2012 and the co-author of the textbook Les Français from Hackett in 2021, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on subjects from gender and professional life in France to teaching French studies in the classroom and online.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama. Their research is concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean.

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Sarah Griswold, "Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate (Cornell UP, 2025), Dr. Sarah Griswold shows how the Levant became a crucial front in a post-1918 fight over the French past—a contingent and contradictory but always hard-charging struggle over a forgotten "heritage mandate." Many scholars, clergy, pundits, politicians, and investors perceived the moment Allied forces entered Jerusalem in December 1917 to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand French influence, evoking the vision of a new colony in the territory: a French Levant. But what transpired for the French state in the Levant after World War I, and why does that ill-conceived venture still matter today?

Resurrecting the Past investigates how heritage politics led to a new form of empire—a French mandate for Syria and Lebanon—and with it a tide of regional and international critique. Against such opposition, the heritage mandate leaned heavily on spectacle and science, generating a sprawling set of sites and objects—Ottoman mansions, crusader castles, Umayyad mosques, Roman arches, buried synagogues, and Sumerian ziggurats.

As Dr. Griswold traces how French heritage efforts cycled through multiple ideal pasts in the Levant from 1918 to 1946, she reveals how each one, though grounded in realities, also complicated those constructs and the work of French heritage-makers. Resurrecting the Past offers a parable of how efforts in heritage politics aimed to construct a union of ideologies and objects deemed the best past for France's uncertain future but struggled as much as they succeeded. Eventually those same heritage politics ironically helped officials justify the end of the "French Levant."

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Kathryn Robson, "Beyond the Happy Ending: Imagining Happiness in Contemporary French Women's Writing and Film" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Kathryn Robson's Beyond the Happy Ending: Imagining Happiness in Contemporary French Women's Writing and Film (Liverpool UP, 2025), happiness (and the question of how to define, measure and facilitate it) has become a key theme in political, economic and social discourses in recent decades in France and elsewhere, yet research on happiness in French culture and film has been limited. Given that happiness is clearly gendered, this book looks critically at the ways in which contemporary French women's writing and film give voice to and critique conceptions of happiness. Analysing French and francophone women's writing (including Nina Bouraoui, Hélène Cixous, Annie Ernaux, Camille Laurens, Leïla Slimani, Delphine de Vigan) and film (including Claire Denis, Céline Sciamma and Agnès Varda), I focus on five main areas: images of happiness in consumer and Internet culture; happiness and intimacy in the family and the home; queering happiness; migrated happiness, and happiness and ageing. Whilst the 'happiness turn' is problematic, the desire for happiness, however fraught, matters and I show how representations of happiness in contemporary French women's writing and film offer alternative conceptions of happiness that enable us to rethink happiness in more critical, diverse and inclusive terms.

Author Dr. Kathryn Robson is a reader in French at Newcastle University and the author in 2019 of I Suffer Therefore I Am: Engaging with Empathy in Contemporary French Women’s Writing and in 2004 Writing Wounds: The Inscription of Trauma in Post-1968 French Women's Life-writing.

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Maurice Samuels, "Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair" (Yale UP, 2024)

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On January 5, 1895, Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s cries of innocence were drowned out by a mob shouting “Death to Judas!” In Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair (Yale UP, 2024), Maurice Samuels gives readers new insight into Dreyfus himself—the man at the center of the affair. He tells the story of Dreyfus’s early life in Paris, his promising career as a French officer, the false accusation leading to his imprisonment on Devil’s Island, the fight to prove his innocence that divided the French nation, and his life of quiet obscurity after World War I.
Samuels’s striking perspective is enriched by a newly available archive of more than three thousand documents and objects donated by the Dreyfus family. Unlike many historians, Samuels argues that Dreyfus was not an “assimilated” Jew. Rather, he epitomized a new model of Jewish identity made possible by the French Revolution, when France became the first European nation to grant Jews full legal equality. This book analyzes Dreyfus’s complex relationship to Judaism and to antisemitism over the course of his life—a story that, as global antisemitism rises, echoes still. It also shows the profound effect of the Dreyfus Affair on the lives of Jews around the world.

Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism at Yale University. He is the author most recently of The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern. He lives in Branford, CT.

Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

Mentioned in the podcast:

Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l'Affaire (1935; Gallimard, 1981).
Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 1789-1945 (HarperCollins, 1991).
Alfred Dreyfus, Cinq années de ma vie (1894-1899) (Maspero, 1982).
Vincent Duclert, Alfred Dreyfus: l'honneur d'un patriote (Fayard, 2016).
Marcel Thomas, L'Affaire sans Dreyfus (Fayard, 1961).
Hannah Arendt, “From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today.” Jewish Social Studies 4, no. 3 (1942): 195–240. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4615201.
Exhibition « Alfred Dreyfus. Truth and justice » at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme in Paris
American Israelite newspaper

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Paul Galvez, "Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting" (Yale UP, 2022)

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cézanne. This series has long been neglected in favor of Courbet’s paintings of rural French life. Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting (Yale UP, 2022) explores these astonishing paintings, staking a claim for their importance to Courbet’s work and later developments in French modernism. Ranging from the grottoes of Courbet’s native Franche-Comté to the beaches of Normandy, Paul Galvez follows the artist on his travels as he uses a palette-knife to transform the Romantic landscape of voyage into a direct, visceral confrontation with the material world.

In this interview, Allison Leigh talks to Dr. Galvez about why he felt we needed another book on Courbet, how he tackled the voluminous scholarship on this artist, and how to make claims about an artist’s intentions from a historical standpoint. Their conversation ranges from how to best use comparisons in art historical argumentation to the difficulties of reproducing some art works—even with high resolution digital photography.

Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

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William Doyle, "Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The French Revolution facilitated the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after gaining power he knew that his first task was to end it. In this book William Doyle describes how he did so, beginning with the three large issues that had destabilized revolutionary France: war, religion, and monarchy. Doyle shows how, as First Consul of the Republic, Napoleon resolved these issues: first by winning the war, then by forging peace with the Church, and finally by making himself a monarch. Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution (Reaktion Books, 2022) ends by discussing Napoleon's one great failure--his attempt to restore the colonial empire destroyed by war and slave rebellion. By the time this endeavor was abandoned, the fragile peace with Great Britain had broken down, and the Napoleonic wars had begun.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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Gianna Englert, "Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Does good democratic government require intelligent, moral, and productive citizens? Can our political institutions educate the kind of citizens we wish or need to have? With recent arguments "against democracy" and fears about the rise of populism, there is growing scepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive together. Some even question whether democracy is worth saving.

In Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage (Oxford UP, 2024), Gianna Englert argues that the dilemmas facing liberal democracy are not unique to our present moment, but have existed since the birth of liberal political thought in nineteenth-century France. Combining political theory and intellectual history, Englert shows how nineteenth-century French liberals championed the idea of "political capacity" as an alternative to democratic political rights and argued that voting rights should be limited to capable citizens who would preserve free, stable institutions against revolutionary passions and democratic demands. Liberals also redefined democracy itself, from its ancient meaning as political rule by the people to something that, counterintuitively, demanded the guidance of a capable few rather than the rule of all.
Understandably, scholarly treatments of political capacity have criticized the idea as exclusionary and potentially dangerous. Englert argues instead that political capacity was a flexible standard that developed alongside a changing society and economy, allowing liberals to embrace democracy without abandoning their first principles. She reveals a forgotten, uncharted path of liberalism in France that remained open to political democracy while aiming to foster citizen capacity. Overall, Democracy Tamed tells the story of how the earliest liberals deployed their notion of the "new democracy" to resist universal suffrage. But it also reveals how later liberals would appropriate their predecessors' antidemocratic arguments to safeguard liberal democracies as we have come to know them.

Gianna Englert is Associate Professor of Humanities in The Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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Madeleine Chalmers, "French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) traces a genealogy of thinking and writing about technology, which takes us from the French avant-gardes to the contemporary 'nonhuman turn' in Anglo-American theory via the Surrealists, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze.
Tracking the unruly transition from Catholic vocabularies of grace, potentiality, and actuality to the modern and contemporary secular lexicon of agency, virtuality, and affect, this book explores technology as a source of subject matter and conceptual metaphors, but also probes how ideas and words are modes of technicity through which we shape and reshape the world. Fusing literature, philosophy, and theology, it offers readers new contexts - and questions - for the egalitarian ontological commitments of contemporary post- and nonhuman thinking.

Guest Dr. Madeleine Chalmers is a lecturer in French studies at the University of Leicester in the UK, and holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. Dr. Chalmers is the recipient of or shortlisted for a number of prestigious essay prizes, and has written numerous articles as well on topics ranging from modernist authors to automation and the idea of “bricolage,” as well as editing a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies on “French Perspectives on Conflict” in 2022.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at the University of Alabama with research focusing on speculative literatures of metropolitan France and the Francophone Caribbean, from surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, as well as the translator of the novels Mevlido's Dreams and The Inner Harbour.

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Daniel J. Sherman, "Sensations: French Archaeology Between Science and Spectacle, 1890-1940" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Sarah talks to Daniel J. Sherman about his most recent book, Sensations: French Archaeology Between Science and Spectacle, 1890-1940 (U Chicago Press, 2025). Sensations is a history of the early years of professional archaeology in France through two controversies – the first in Carthage in what the French protectorate of Tunisia and the second in the small rural community of Glozel in central France. The book shows how “archaeology as we know it today grew out of a fundamental tension between archaeologist’s scientific ambitions and their continuing need for media attention.” (1) Timely without being presentist, funny without being unserious, the book explores questions of embodiment, performance, photography, fake news, professional quarrels, and the mediatization of scandal.

The conversation explores the two sites of controversy as well as the network of professional archaeologists, amateur “collectors”, journalists, and others who shaped how the public understood and engaged with the ancient past. In addition to discussing the major themes of the book, our conversation delves into considerations of historical empathy, archaeological performance and “the dig”, and the story of a technical report that sparked Sherman’s interest in the relationship between media and archaeology.

Daniel J. Sherman is Lineberger Distinguished Professor of Art History and History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A scholar of museums, monuments, and commemorative practice in modern Europe, Dan has also researched the history of primitivism in the French visual arts as well as memory culture in late 19th and early 20th century France.

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Miranda Spieler, "Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the decades leading up to the French Revolution, when Paris was celebrated as an oasis of liberty, slaves fled there, hoping to be freed. They pictured Paris as a refuge from France’s notorious slave-trading ports.

The French were late to the slave trade, but they dominated the global market in enslaved people by the late 1780s. This explosive growth transformed Paris, the cultural capital of the Enlightenment, into a dangerous place for people in bondage. Those seeking freedom in Paris faced manhunts, arrest, and deportation. Some put their faith in lawyers, believing the city’s courts would free them. Examining the lives of those whose dashed hopes and creative persistence capture the spirit of the era, in Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories (Harvard University Press, 2025), Dr. Miranda Spieler brings to light a hidden story of slavery and the struggle for freedom.

Fugitive slaves collided with spying networks, nosy neighbors, and overlapping judicial authorities. Their clandestine lives left a paper trail. In a feat of historical detective work, Dr. Spieler retraces their steps and brings to light the new racialized legal culture that permeated every aspect of everyday life. She pieces together vivid, granular portraits of men, women, and children who came from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. We learn of their strategies and hiding places, their family histories and relationships to well-known Enlightenment figures. Slaves in Paris is a history of hunted people. It is also a tribute to their resilience.

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Justine De Young, "The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern Women and Modern Artists in Impressionist Paris" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Using artworks by Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and others, The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern Women and Modern Artists in Impressionist Paris (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Justine De Young explores how women and artists in Impressionist Paris (1855-1885) crafted their public images to exploit and resist stereotypes.
French societal expectations and beauty ideals shaped how women were seen and how they chose to present themselves in public – whether on the street, in a photograph, or in a portrait on the walls of the annual Paris Salon. On Paris's broad new boulevards and in its public parks and theaters, women dressed to impress anonymous strangers as well as their friends. They even circulated aspirational photographs of themselves. Looking at a rich array of visual sources – from portraits to modern-life paintings, and from photographs to fashion plates – Dr. De Young reveals how women were seen, how they aspired to be seen, and how they navigated public life in Second Empire and Belle Époque Paris.
This book considers how fashionable feminine “types” made famous in books, caricatures, and paintings created a visual lexicon and stylistic guide for women. Men and women alike relied on these types – cocotte (mistress), jeune veuve (young widow), amazone (independent equestrienne), demoiselle de magasin (shopgirl), and Parisienne (chic Parisian woman) – to judge the class, character, morality, and worth of strangers. With a rich set of illustrations from the Impressionist canon and beyond, The Art of Parisian Chic shows how modern women used fashion and these stereotypes to construct and reinvent their identities.

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Michelle Bumatay, "On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power" (Ohio State UP, 2025)

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power (The Ohio State UP, 2025) is the first book-length study in English about Black francophone cartoonists and their work. Author Michelle Bumatay decenters Eurocentric conceptions of francophone comic art and foregrounds the ubiquity of Western racial stereotypes encoded in mainstream French and Belgian bandes dessinées as well as the imbalance of power between the Global North and the Global South carried over from the colonial era. By examining a diversity of Black cartoonists’ aesthetic and material responses to the colonially inherited medium of bandes dessinées, she argues that their innovations constitute important reparative work that combats racial stereotypes and challenges transcolonial power imbalances.

Bumatay demonstrates how Barly Baruti, Papa Mfumu’eto, Marguerite Abouet, Japhet Miagotar, and other Black cartoonists throughout the francophone world employ a range of tactics to tell their own stories. Through a balance of historical context and close readings, she shows how these artists represent and comment on their everyday lives in a postcolonial reality, expose and critique racial capitalism and exploitation, and provide new ways of seeing and understanding Black francophone peoples and cultures.

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Eric T. Jennings, "Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean" (Yale UP, 2025)

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Vanilla is one of the most expensive of flavorings—so valuable that it was smuggled or stolen by pirates in the early days—and yet it is everywhere. It is a key ingredient in dishes ranging from crème brûlée to Japanese purin. It is the quintessential ice cream flavor in the United States. In Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean (Yale UP, 2025) Dr. Eric T. Jennings explains how the world’s only edible orchid, originally endemic to Central America, became embedded in the international culinary and cultural landscape.

In tracing vanilla’s rise, Dr. Jennings describes how in the 1840s an enslaved boy named Edmond Albius discovered a way to pollinate vanilla orchids with a toothpick or needle—an ingenious process that is still in use. This method transformed the vanilla sector by enabling the plant to be grown outside of its natural range. Dr. Jennings also looks at how the vanilla craze led to the search for now‑pervasive substitutes, and how a vanilla lobby has fought back. He further unravels how vanilla—the world’s most expensive crop and once considered its most refined fragrance—came to mean “bland.”

This tale of botany, production techniques, consumption habits, and colonial rivalry connects the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, revealing how vanilla has become a potent symbol of the modern global village.

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Matt Myers, "The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968-1989" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The European left seemed to be in rude health during the 1970s. Never had so many political parties committed to representing the working class been in power simultaneously across the continent. New forms of mobilisation led by female, immigrant, and young wage-earners seemed to reflect the growing strength of the workers' movement rather than its pending obsolescence. Parties and trade unions grew rapidly as a diverse new generation entered the ranks. Why did the left's forward march halt so abruptly?

The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968-1989 (Oxford UP, 2025)shows how the left's defeats after the mid-1970s were not the inevitable result of de-industrialisation or, more precisely, the transition to a globalised and post-Fordist world that abolished the working class as a great historical actor. Choices that were made during a concentrated but decisive moment contributed to the left's lost battles. The British, French, and Italian left managed the shift to a new era by marginalising those groups of workers who had invested it with hopes of social and political transformation. Communist, socialist, and social democratic parties helped disempower the new components of the working class in workplaces, in society, in the political system, and successfully disciplined their traditional working-class supporters. The left encountered a crisis of purpose and identity, a sense of both defeat and lost opportunities, and the dissolution of the idea of a community of fate amongst workers. This book provides a comparative analysis of the left's fragmenting relationship with the working class and a 'feel' for the culture of three leading industrial countries during a traumatic transition of late twentieth-century history. It concludes that decisions taken by the left during the 1970s contributed to the tragic inversion of the expected outcome of that hopeful decade.

Matt Myers is a Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Oxford

YouTube Channel here

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Todd McGowan, "The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The difficulty of Jacques Lacan's thought is notorious. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan cuts through this difficulty to provide a clear, jargon-free approach to understanding it. The book describes Lacan's life, the context from which he emerged, and the reception of his theory. Readers will come away with an understanding of concepts such as jouissance, the objet a, and the big Other. The book frames Lacan's thought in the history of philosophy and explains it through jokes, films, and popular culture. In this light, Lacan becomes a thinker of philosophical importance in his own right, on a par with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Lacan's great contribution is the introduction of the unconscious into subjectivity, which results in a challenge to both the psychoanalytic establishment and to philosophers. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan provides readers with a way of understanding the nature of Lacan's contribution.

Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Embracing Alienation, The Racist Fantasy, Emancipation After Hegel, Capitalism and Desire, and Only a Joke Can Save Us, among other books. He is also the cohost of the Why Theory podcast with Ryan Engley.

Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).

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Natacha Chetcuti-Osorovitz and Sara Garbagnoli "La Pensée Wittig: Une Introduction" (Payot, 2025)

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How is it possible to be a subject when faced with oppression? The revolutionary thought and work of French novelist and lesbian thinker Monique Wittig are today in dialogue with feminist and LGBTQIA+ analyses and politics. Her materialist theorization of lesbianism subfuses contemporary feminism and queer political and social movements. By proposing a detailed analysis of heterosexuality as a total political regime, Wittig as a theorist, writer, and activist opens up the possibility of a world beyond the categories of sex and gender, founded on a new definition of the human. This book acts as a roadmap to help us reach such a horizon. Sara Garbagnoli and her co-author Natacha Chetcuti-Osorovitz situate Wittig within array of feminist movements of the 20th century and explain why her theories are so pertinent in today's political landscape.

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I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

“My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery,” declared Jean‑Jacques Dessalines as he announced the independence of Haiti, the most radical nation‑state during the Age of Revolution and the first country ever to permanently outlaw slavery. Enslaved for the first thirty years of his life, Dessalines (c. 1758–1806) joined the revolution that abolished slavery within the French colony. Then he became a general in the colonial army of the new French Republic. When it was discovered that France once again supported slavery, Dessalines declared war on his former allies. Fighting under the slogan “Liberty or Death,” his army forced the French to evacuate in late 1803. At the start of the new year, Dessalines declared independence from France and became the leader of a free Haiti.
A hero to Haitians for centuries, Dessalines is portrayed abroad as barbarous and violent. Yet this caricature derives not from facts—as Dr. Julia Gaffield demonstrates with extensive new research—but from the fears of contemporary enslavers. Showcasing the man behind the myths, Dr. Gaffield reveals Dessalines’s deep suffering, warm friendships, and unwavering commitment to destroying slavery, racism, and colonialism, and his bold insistence on his people’s right to liberty and equality.

Our guest is: Dr. Julia Gaffield, who is associate professor of history at William & Mary. She is the author of Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution; and of I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom (Yale UP, 2025). She lives in Williamsburg, VA.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and a developmental editor. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the show’s newsletter here

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Alex R. Tipei, "Unintended Nations: How French Liberals' Empire of Civilization Remade Southeast Europe and the Post-Napoleonic World" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025)

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, French liberals set out to create an informal empire. Their efforts to cultivate unequal partnerships with Christian, Greek-speaking elites in southeast Europe shaped national identities and structured global civilizational hierarchies over the decades that followed.

Unintended Nations: France’s Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025) tracks a notion of civilization that developed in early nineteenth-century France. Dr. Alex Tipei explores the constellation of ideas, beliefs, and practices this concept invoked – what she calls civilization-speak – and charts the cross-continental networks that employed it as an organizing principle. Drawing on archival and printed primary sources in six languages, Dr. Tipei maps out the uses of this civilization-speak on both sides of the continent, focusing on France and the lands that make up significant parts of present-day Greece and Romania. She shows how and why French liberals mobilized civilization-speak to, offering an innovative analysis of liberalism and capitalism’s relationship to informal empire.

Calling into question long-standing assumptions about the rise of nationalism in southeast Europe, Unintended Nations explores how Franco-Balkan exchanges helped define political, civilizational, and biopolitical boundaries in the post-Napoleonic era.

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Kevin Passmore, "The Maginot Line: A New History of the Fall of France" (Yale UP, 2025)

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Maginot Line was a marvel of 1930s engineering. The huge forts, up to eighty meters underground, contained hospitals, modern kitchens, telephone exchanges, and even electric trains. Kilometres of underground galleries led to casements hidden in the terrain, and turrets that rose from the ground to fire upon the enemy. The fortifications were invulnerable to the heaviest artillery and to chemical warfare.

Despite this extensive preparation, France fell to Germany in a little under six weeks. Eight decades on, the Maginot Line is still remembered as an expensively misguided response to obvious danger.

In The Maginot Line: A New History (Yale University Press, 2025), Dr. Kevin Passmore presents a groundbreaking account reevaluating the Maginot Line. He traces the controversies surrounding construction, the lives of the men who manned the forts, the impact on German-speaking inhabitants of the frontier, and the fight against espionage from within. Far from a backward step, the Maginot Line was an ambitious project of modernisation—one that was let down by strategic error and growing dissatisfaction with fortification.

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Laura Hobson Faure, "Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust" (Yale UP, 2025)

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The first account of Jewish children’s flight from Nazi Germany to France—and their subsequent escape to America from the Vichy regime

At the eve of the Second World War, an estimated 1.6 million Jewish children lived in Nazi-occupied Europe. While 10,000 of them escaped to Britain in the Kindertransport, only some 500 found a new home in France. Here they attempted to begin again—but their refuge would all too soon become a trap.
For the first time, Laura Hobson Faure brings to life the experiences of these children, and the Jewish and non-Jewish organizations who helped them. Drawing on survivors’ testimonies as well as children’s diaries, letters, drawings, songs, and poems, Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust (Yale UP, 2025) re-creates their complex journeys, including how some of them eventually found safety in America.
Hobson Faure paints a moving portrait of these children and their escape, uncovering their agency in the flight from Nazism—and knits together the network of the many who aided them along the way.

Laura Hobson Faure is professor of modern history and chair of Modern Jewish History at Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne. She’s an expert on French-American Jewish history and the author of The “Jewish Marshall Plan”: The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France.

Mentioned in the podcast:

Rebecca Clifford, Survivors, Children’s Lives after the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2020).
Rebecca Clifford, “Who is a Survivor? Child Holocaust Survivors and the Development of a Generational Identity,” Oral History Forum. Forum d’Histoire Orale 37 (2017).
Beth B. Cohen, Child Survivors of the Holocaust: The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience (Rutgers University Press, 2018).
Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (Yale University Press, 1991).
Katy Hazan, “Le sauvetage des enfants juifs de France vers les Amériques, 1933-1947,” in Hélène Harter and André Kaspi, Terres promises: mélanges offerts à André Kaspi, 2008, p. 481-93.
Katy Hazan, Rire le jour, pleurer la nuit: les enfants juifs cachés dans la Creuse pendant la guerre, 1939-1944 (Calman-Levy, 2014).
Laura Hobson Faure, Manon Pignot, and Antoine Rivière, eds., Enfants en guerre. “Sans famille” dans les conflits du XXe siècle (CNRS, 2023).
Sarah L. Holloway, Louise Holt, and Sarah Mills, “Questions of Agency: Capacity, Subjectivity, Spatiality and Temporality,” Progress in Human Geography 43, no. 3 (2019): 458–477.
Laurent Joly, L'État contre les Juifs: Vichy, les nazis et la persécution antisémite 1940–1944 (Grasset, 2018).
Célia Keren, “Autobiographies of Spanish Refugee Children at the Quaker Home in La Rouvière (France, 1940): Humanitarian Communication and Children’s Writings,” Les Cahiers de FRAMESPA 5 (2010).
Lisa Moses Leff, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Joanna B. Michlic, “Missed Lessons from the Holocaust: Avoiding Complexities and Darker Aspects of Jewish Child Survivors’ Life Experiences,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 17, no. 2 (Spring 2024): 272–286. See also her forthcoming book.

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Christopher C. Gorham, "Matisse at War: Art and Resistance in Nazi Occupied France" (Citadel Press, 2025)

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 1940, with the Nazis sweeping through France, Henri Matisse found himself at a personal and artistic crossroads. His 42-year marriage had ended, he was gravely ill, and after decades at the forefront of modern art, he was beset by doubt. As scores of famous figures escaped the country, Matisse took refuge in Nice, with his companion, Lydia Delectorskaya. By defiantly remaining, Matisse was a source of inspiration for his nation.

While enemy agents and Resistance fighters played cat-and-mouse in the alleyways of Nice, Matisse’s son, Jean, engaged in sabotage efforts with the Allies. In Paris, under the swastika, Matisse’s estranged wife, Amélie, worked for the Communist underground. His beloved daughter, Marguerite, active in the French Resistance, was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, sentenced to Ravensbruck concentration camp—and miraculously escaped when her train was halted by Allied bombs. His younger, son, Pierre helped Jewish artists escape to New York; even his teenaged grandson risked his life by defying the Germans and their Vichy collaborators.

Amidst this chaos, Matisse responded to the dark days of war by inventing a dazzling new paper technique that led to some of his most iconic pieces, including The Fall of Icarus, his profile of Charles De Gaulle, Monsieur Loyal, and his groundbreaking cut-out book, Jazz. His wartime works were acts of resistance, subtly patriotic and daringly new.
Drawing on intimate letters and a multitude of other sources, Christopher C. Gorham illuminates this momentous stage of Matisse’s life as never before in Matisse at War: Art and Resistance in Nazi Occupied France (Citadel Press, 2025), revealing an artist on a journey of reinvention, wrenching meaning from the suffering of war, and holding up the light of human imagination against the torch of fascism to create some of the most exciting work of his career, of the 20th century, and in the history of art.

Guest: Christopher C. Gorham (he/him) is a lawyer, educator, and acclaimed author whose books include Matisse at War and the Goodreads Choice Award finalist, The Confidante. He lives in Boston, and can be found at ChristopherCGorham.com and on social media @christophercgorham.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke Profile here

Linktree here

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Robert Ivermee, "Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This is a powerful new account of a chapter in history that is crucial to understand, yet often overlooked. For 150 years, from the reign of Louis XIV to the downfall of Napoleon, France was an aggressive imperial power in South Asia, driven by the pursuit of greatness and riches. Through their East India company and state, the French established a far-reaching empire in India, only to see their dominant position undermined by conflict with Indian rulers, competition from other European nations, and a series of fatal strategic errors.

Exploding the myth of a benign French presence on the subcontinent, Robert Ivermee's extensive research reveals how France's Indian empire relied on war-making, conquest, opportunistic alliances, regime change and slavery to pursue its ambitions. He considers influential French figures' reactions to the collapse of the imperial project, not least their deployment of new ideas, like freedom and the rights of man, to justify fresh ventures of domination--even as colonial authorities failed to acknowledge the equality of French India's diverse indigenous peoples, both before and after the French Revolution.

From great power rivalry to informal empire and entrenched inequalities, Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India (Oxford UP, 2025) tackles topics that remain vital and urgent in today's world.

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Chris Millington, "A History of Fascism in France: From the First World War to the National Front" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

FASCISM...FRANCE. Two words/ideas that scholars have spent much time and energy debating in relationship to one another. Chris Millington's A History of Fascism in France: From the First World War to the National Front (Bloomsbury, 2019) is a work of synthesis that also draws on the author's own research for key examples and evidence to support its narrative and claims. Moving chronologically, the book's chapters take the reader from the impact of the First World War right up to the contemporary period in French politics, culture, and society. A narrative and analysis focused on the French context, the book situates France within a broader European frame.

Engaging the complex historiographic battles surrounding French fascism in ways that will be helpful to non-specialists, and especially to student readers, the book condenses decades of previous scholarship while delving into concrete cases and moments that help to illustrate the stakes of this historical and political field. Examining movements like the Croix-de-Feu, Faisceau, Jeunesses Patriotes, Partie Social Français, and the Cagoulards within the broader interwar landscape of right-wing thought and politics, the book goes on to consider the Vichy period and the emergence of the National Front after the Second World War.

*Special note: Chris and I ran out of time before I could ask him about what he's been working on since the publication of A History of Fascism in France. Readers may also be interested in his most recent book, France in the Second World War: Collaboration, Resistance, Holocaust, Empire (Bloomsbury, 2020).

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Diana Souhami, "No Modernism Without Lesbians" (Head of Zeus Book, 2020)

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Diana Souhami talks about her new book No Modernism Without Lesbians, out 2020 with Head of Zeus books.

A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2020. This is the extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place – Paris, between the wars – fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own – forming a community around them in Paris. Each of these four central women interacted with a myriad of others, some of the most influential, most entertaining, most shocking and most brilliant figures of the age. Diana Souhami weaves together their stories to create a vivid moving tapestry of life among the Modernists in pre-war Paris.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Jérémy Filet, "The Jacobites and the Grand Tour: Educational Travel and Small-States' Diplomacy" (Manchester UP, 2025)

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Jacobites and the Grand Tour: Educational travel and small-states' diplomacy (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Jérémy Filet is the first monograph to fully examine the intersecting networks of Jacobites and travellers to the continent. In the book, Dr. Filet considers how small states used official diplomacy and deployed soft power - embodied by educational academies - to achieve foreign policy goals. This work uses little-known archival materials to explain how and why certain small states secretly supported the Jacobite cause during the crucial years surrounding the 1715 rising, while others stayed out of Jacobite affairs.

The book demonstrates how early modern small states sought to cultivate good relations with Britain by attracting travellers as part of a wider trend of ensuring connections with future diplomats or politicians in case a Stuart restoration never came. This publication therefore brings together a study of Britain, small states, Jacobitism, and educational travel, in its nexus at continental academies.

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Peter K. Andersson, "The Dandy: A People's History of Sartorial Splendour" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A history of the dandy from below, from Beau Brummell and Baudelaire to Bowie and Bolan... and beyond. The historical figure of the dandy has commonly been described as an upper-class gentleman, often exemplified by well-known men such as Beau Brummell, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Max Beerbohm. But there is a broader history to be told about the dandy - one that incorporates unknown men from the lower strata of society. The Dandy: A People's History of Sartorial Splendour (Oxford UP, 2025) constitutes the first ever history of those dandies who emanated from the less privileged layers of the populace - the lowly clerks, shop assistants, domestic servants, and labourers who increasingly during the modern age have emerged as style-conscious men about town. Peter Andersson shows that dandyism is far from just an elite phenomenon represented by famous poets and artists. He shows how dandyism as a popular youth subculture grew into an influential cultural movement, from the days of Beau Brummell in the early 19th century to the age of mods in the 1960s. A series of fascinating in-depth studies of the wide variety of dandy subcultures that have surfaced around the world in the last two centuries tell the story of how the shaping of fashions and the image of men became increasingly democratized, with the arbiters of taste increasingly coming from the other end of the social spectrum. Along the way, we encounter such long-forgotten groups as the mashers, the knuts, the Paris gandins and the Berlin transgender dandies, alongside more well-known but unexplored figures like the zoot suiter, the teddy boy, and the New Romantic. Above all, this is a story of how fundamental aspects of modern culture such as fashion, style, and conduct have been shaped from below just as much as from above. It is a story that shows how the problematic business of young men trying to find an identity is an enduring phenomenon - and one sadly often accompanied by innocent victims along the way.

Peter K. Andersson is a historian and writer, with a PhD in History from Lund University in Sweden. He has been a visiting scholar at the universities of London, Oxford, and Bologna, and has written extensively on Victorian cultural history, urban history, and popular culture.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Mark Braude, "The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba from Empire to Exile" (Penguin Press, 2018)

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

I must’ve been a kid when I first heard the palindrome “Able I was ere I saw Elba”. Napoleon didn’t mean a lot to me at the time. “Elba” meant even less. Decades later, I had learned a little more about Napoleon and his time there, but not that all that much it turns out. And then came Mark Braude’s The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba from Empire to Exile (Penguin Press, 2018)…

This unexpected and absorbing book delves into the story of Napoleon’s exile on the island of Elba following his abdication in 1814. After his escape and return to France for the “100 Days,” Napoleon was, of course, finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815. The Invisible Emperor explores a period in between the “bigger-ticket” events with which readers may be more familiar, a time and space in which Napoleon at once out of sight and more in contact with everyday people than perhaps at any other point in his career.

Written in multiple short chapters comprising four parts that follow the seasons of Bonaparte’s ten-month stay on Elba, The Invisible Emperor reconsiders the Napoleonic legend from the point of view of a moment of relative quiet in a modest setting. Carefully researched and a pleasure to read, it challenges aspects of the towering historical figure’s mythology. The space, timeline, and scale of this history may be small, but this is a Napoleon we don’t typically hear about. Presented in a narrative rich with curious details and a surprising intimacy, The Invisible Emperor manages to humanize an epic history and life about which so much has been written over the past two centuries.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written and performed by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (“hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

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Charly Coleman, "The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Charly Coleman's latest book, The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2021) is at once a history of ideas, the economy, religion, and material culture. Pursuing the imbrication of the economy and theology with respect to both worldly and spiritual value and wealth, the book explores the emergence and development of a specifically Catholic ethic of capitalism particular to the French context in the century and more leading up to the French Revolution.

In its six chapters, the book examines the Eucharist, John Law's system, speculation and debt, usury, consumption, luxury, and more. By the time this reader reached the epilogue, it became clear that The Spirit of French Capitalism is both a history of the Age of Enlightenment and a genealogy/prehistory of the commodity fetishism elaborated by Marx and Marxist thinkers from the nineteenth century to the present. Faith in infinite wealth creation, obsessive consumption, pleasure, abundance, and enchantment are as much a part of the history of capitalism as scarcity, regulation, and restraint. Provocative and complicated, the book will be of great interest scholars and students of the histories of the early modern economy, religion, and the state in France and elsewhere, as well as the history of capitalism more broadly.

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Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Megan Brown details the surprising story of how Algeria joined and then left the postwar European Economic Community and what its past inclusion means for extracontinental membership in today’s European Union.

On their face, the mid-1950s negotiations over European integration were aimed at securing unity in order to prevent violent conflict and boost economies emerging from the disaster of World War II. But French diplomats had other motives, too. From Africa to Southeast Asia, France’s empire was unraveling. France insisted that Algeria—the crown jewel of the empire and home to a nationalist movement then pleading its case to the United Nations—be included in the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community. The French hoped that Algeria’s involvement in the EEC would quell colonial unrest and confirm international agreement that Algeria was indeed French.

French authorities harnessed Algeria’s legal status as an official département within the empire to claim that European trade regulations and labor rights should traverse the Mediterranean. Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany conceded in order to move forward with the treaty, and Algeria entered a rights regime that allowed free movement of labor and guaranteed security for the families of migrant workers. Even after independence in 1962, Algeria remained part of the community, although its ongoing inclusion was a matter of debate. Still, Algeria’s membership continued until 1976, when a formal treaty removed it from the European community.

In this book, Dr. Brown combats understandings of Europe’s “natural” borders by emphasizing the extracontinental contours of the early union. The unification vision was never spatially limited, suggesting that contemporary arguments for geographic boundaries excluding Turkey and areas of Eastern Europe from the European Union must be seen as ahistorical.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Christy Pichichero, "The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon" (Cornell UP, 2018)

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Covering the pivotal period from the mid-seventeenth century through the era of the French Revolution, Christy Pichichero's The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Cornell University Press, 2018; paperback ed. 2020) is a fascinating interdisciplinary study that pushes us to rethink our ideas about both the military and the Enlightenment in and beyond a France that was a global, as well as a continental European imperial power. As Pichichero shows, the (long) eighteenth century holds the key to our understanding historical concepts and transformations that we tend to associate with later developments in military thought and practice, from conventions around "good" and "humane" conflict to ideas about community and civility between soldiers fighting together and on opposing sides.

The book's five chapters explore a broad range of compelling events and sources, from the work of well known Enlightenment thinkers and authors such as Voltaire and Choderlos de Laclos, to military manuals and debates regarding how wars would and should be waged, how soldiers should be trained to think and act in battle. Now available in a new paperback edition, the book is a must-read for anyone interested in the longue durée of military culture and warfare, as well as those with an interest in all that the Enlightenment did and could mean.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire.She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.

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Julian Jackson, "De Gaulle" (Harvard UP, 2018)

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Charles de Gaulle is one of the greatest figures of twentieth century history. If Sir Winston Churchill was (in the words of Harold Macmillan) the "greatest Englishman In history", then Charles de Gaulle was without a doubt, the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon Bonaparte. Why so? In the early summer of 1940, when France was overrun by German troops, one junior general who had fought in the trenches in Verdun refused to accept defeat. He fled to London, where he took to the radio to address his compatriots back home. “Whatever happens,” he said, “the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.” At that moment, Charles de Gaulle entered history.

For the rest of the war, de Gaulle insisted he and his Free French movement were the true embodiment of France. Through sheer force of his personality and the grandeur of his vision of France, he inspired French men and women to risk their lives to resist the Nazi occupation. Usually proud and aloof, but almost always confident in his own leadership, he quarreled violently with Churchill, Roosevelt and many of his own countrymen. Yet they knew they would need his help to rebuild a shattered France. Thanks to de Gaulle, France was recognized as one of the victorious Allies when Germany was finally defeated. Then, as President of the Fifth Republic, he brought France back from the brink of a civil war over the war in Algeria. And, made the difficult decision to end the self-same war. Thereafter he challenged American hegemony, took France out of NATO, and twice vetoed British entry into the European Community in his pursuit of what he called “a certain idea of France.”

Julian Jackson, Professor of History at Queen Mary College, University of London, past winner of the Wolfson History Prize and the winner in 2018 of the Paris Book Award for his book on De Gaulle--De Gaulle (Harvard University Press, 2018)--has written a magnificent biography, the first major reconsideration in over twenty years. Drawing on the extensive resources of the recently opened de Gaulle archives, Jackson reveals the conservative roots of de Gaulle’s intellectual formation and upbringing, sheds new light on his relationship with Churchill, and shows how de Gaulle confronted riots at home and violent independence movements abroad from the Middle East to Vietnam. No previous biography has so vividly depicted this towering figure whose legacy remains evident in present-day France. In short Professor Jackson has written a superb book, which in every way possible is a glittering ornament in the biographical art.

Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.

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Margaret Cook Andersen, "Fertile Expectations: The Politics of Involuntary Childlessness in Twentieth-Century France" (Manchester UP, 2025)

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

An engaging history of motherhood, demography, and infertility in twentieth-century France, Fertile expectations: The politics of involuntary childlessness in twentieth-century France (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Margaret Andersen explores fraught political and cultural meanings attached to the notion of an "ideal" family size. When statistics revealed a sustained drop in France's birthrate, pronatalist activists pushed for financial benefits, propaganda, and punitive measures to counter declining fertility. Situating infertility within this history, the author details innovations in fertility medicine, cultural awareness of artificial insemination, and changing laws on child adoption. These practices offered new ways of responding to infertility and formed part of a growing expectation of being able to control one's fertility and family size. This book presents the political and cultural context for understanding why private questions about when to start a family, how many children to have, and how to cope with involuntary childlessness, evolved and became part of state demographic policies.

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Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira, "Ascending Republic: The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France" (MIT Press, 2025)

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On August 27, 1783, a large crowd gathered in Paris to watch the first ascent of a hydrogen balloon. Despite the initial feverish enthusiasm, by the mid-nineteenth century the balloon remained relatively unchanged and was no longer seen as the harbinger of a new era. Yet that all changed in the last third of the century, when following the traumatic Franco-Prussian War defeat, the balloon reemerged to become the modern artifact that captured the attention of many. Through this process, the balloon became an important symbol of the fledgling Third Republic, and France established itself as the world leader in flight. In Ascending Republic: The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France (MIT Press, 2025), Dr. Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira tells for the first time the story of this surprising revival.
Through extensive research in the press and archives in France, the United States, and Brazil, De Oliveira argues that French civil society cultivated popular enthusiasm for flight (what historians call “airmindedness”) decades before the advent of the airplane. Champions of French ballooning made the case that if the British Royal Navy controlled the seas and the Imperial German Army dominated the continent, then France needed to take ownership of the skies. The French appropriated this newly imagined geopolitical space through a variety of practices, from republican savants who studied the atmosphere at high altitudes to aristocrats who organized transcontinental long-distance competitions. All of this made Paris into the global capital of a thriving aeronautical culture that incorporated seemingly contradictory visions of sacrificial patriotism, aristocratic modernity, colonial anxiety, and technological cosmopolitanism.

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Julie Singer, "Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A wide-ranging study of the rich questions raised by speaking infants in medieval French literature.
Medieval literature is full of strange moments when infants (even fetuses) speak. In Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature, (U Chicago Press, 2025) Julie Singer explores the unsettling questions raised by these events, including What is a person? Is speech fundamental to our humanity? And what does it mean, or what does it matter, to speak truth to power?
Singer contends that descriptions of baby talk in medieval French literature are far from trivial. Through treatises, manuals, poetry, and devotional texts, Singer charts how writers imagined infants to speak with an authority untainted by human experience. What their children say, then, offers unique insight into medieval hopes for universal answers to life’s deepest wonderings.

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Elise Franklin "Disintegrating Empire: Algerian Family Migration and the Limits of the Welfare State in France" (University of Nebraska Press, 2024)

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today’s episode is a conversation with Dr. Elise Franklin whose first book, Disintegrating Empire: Algerian Family Migration and the Limits of the Welfare State in France, was published by the University of Nebraska Press (2024). Distintegrating Empire examines the processes of decolonization through the intersecting histories of the French welfare state, family migration from Algeria to France, and the French social workers who mediated between the state and their Algerian clients. Franklin argues for the importance of connecting these threads before, through and after formal decolonization, allowing us to see not only the colonial origins of French welfare but the ways in which the French welfare state always winnowed down who could access its benefits, making a “golden age” of welfare only out of the purposeful exclusion of Algerian workers and their families. In our conversation, we cover Franklin’s main arguments and how she came to this analysis through the winding path of archival research and intellectual development. Distintegrating Empire blends intimate social histories of Algerian families in the Nord, diplomatic and institutional histories of French and Algerian policy before and after 1962, and political and cultural histories of integration and citizenship as part of the ongoing conversation about who “deserved” welfare and under what conditions.

Elise Franklin is an assistant professor at the University of Louisville where she researches modern French history with a particular focus on gender, colonialism, and decolonization.

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Selda Altan, "Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan-Indochina Railway" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Wed, 21 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Chinese workers helped build the modern world. They labored on New World plantations, worked in South African mines, and toiled through the construction of the Panama Canal, among many other projects. While most investigations of Chinese workers focus on migrant labor, Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan-Indochina Railway (Stanford UP, 2024) explores Chinese labor under colonial regimes within China through an examination of the Yunnan-Indochina Railway, constructed between 1898-1910. The Yunnan railway--a French investment in imperial China during the age of "railroad colonialism"--connected French-colonized Indochina to Chinese markets with a promise of cross-border trade in tin, silk, tea, and opium. However, this ambitious project resulted in fiasco. Thousands of Chinese workers died during the horrid construction process, and costs exceeded original estimates by 74%.

Drawing on Chinese, French, and British archival accounts of day-to-day worker struggles and labor conflicts along the railway, Selda Altan argues that long before the Chinese Communist Party defined Chinese workers as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement in the 1920s, the modern figure of the Chinese worker was born in the crosscurrents of empire and nation in the late nineteenth century. Yunnan railway workers contested the conditions of their employment with the knowledge of a globalizing capitalist market, fundamentally reshaping Chinese ideas of free labor, national sovereignty, and regional leadership in East and Southeast Asia.

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Marc Jaffré, "The Courtiers and the Court of Louis XIII, 1610-1643" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 07 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Marc Jaffré joins Jana Byars for a lively conversation about The Courtiers and the Court of Louis XIII, 1610- 1643 (Oxford University Press, 2025). Louis XIII's court has long been a feature of the popular imaginary, thanks in part to the many movie and TV adaptations of Alexandre Dumas' novel The Three Musketeers. Yet it remains misunderstood, commonly mischaracterised as weak, unimportant, or wholly subservient to the whims of Louis XIII. Seeking to correct this narrative, Marc Jaffré here offers a comprehensive analysis of the court's institutional, political, social, cultural, ceremonial, and financial development, across its very wide range of active participants, from courtiers, financiers, merchants, to lower-ranking household members.

The close study engages with the key issues of Louis' reign: the delegitimizing role of Cardinal Richelieu minister-favourite; the turbulent family dynamics that led Louis to wage wars against his mother, his brother, and his cousins; the backdrop of war, both with the Huguenots and within the context of the Thirty Years War; and the transformative rise of salon culture. In so doing, the court is shown to be a central, vibrant, and misunderstood element of early modern and pre-Louis XIV French history and culture. Courtiers, artisans, merchants, and financiers, among others, are shown to have played key roles in shaping the institutional, political, cultural, economic, and military framework of the court, and Louis XIII's reign more generally. In challenging the top-down paradigm prevalent in court studies, this monograph provides crucial correctives to the existing narrative that Louis XIII's court was weak or unimportant and simultaneously revises how early modern courts and their development have been understood historiographically.

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"I have not Finished...": Rokahya Diallo on being Black, Muslim, and frequently interrupted (Emilie Diouf, JP)

Fri, 02 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Emilie Diouf of Brandeis English, whose monograph on genocide and trauma is forthcoming, joins John to speak with the celebrated French journalist and activist Rokahya Diallo. Diouf places Diallo within a transnational black intellectual tradition, founded in the interwar period in the Negritude movement; it was then that Paulette, Jeanne, and Anne Nardal’s literary salon became a meeting ground for African, Antillean, and African-American intellectuals, in the Parisian suburb of Clamart.

The three discuss the slowly changing racial climate in France and globally; how to counter ethnonationalism; as well as the currents of dissent or disdain that threaten to disrupt even leftwing political solidarity.

Mentioned in the Episode

Diallo has directed 8 documentaries among which her 2013 award winning film, Les Marches de la Liberté (Steps to Freedom) . She is also the author of many books, including most recently, La France tu l’aimes ou tu la fermes or France, Love it or Shut it, a collection of her major articles on the “struggle against oppression in France and globally.”
Ne reste pas à ta place, or Don’t try to fit in, (2016) and forthcoming book Le dictionnaire amoureux du féminisme or A Feminist Lover’s Dictionary (Editions Plon, March 2025)
Les Indivisibles: humor watchdog organization. Parody ceremony Y’a Bon Awards given to the “most racist sentences” every year.
Rokahya Diallo
Coordination des Femmes Noir
Awa Thiam, La Parole aux Négresses
Afrofeminism
2005 Clichy-sous-bois, a Paris banlieue, was the site of major unrest. Zyed Benna, 17, of Tunisian descent, and Bouna Traoré, 15, of Mauritanian descent, died tragically in a substation while trying to avoid detention.
The leading French TV station, TF1, made waves (and history) by hiring Harry Roselmack in 2016
Diallo’s own strong X/Twitter presence allows her to talk about being harassed—on Twitter/X itself!--and she has a podcast with Grace Ly, Kiffe Ta Race
Diallo’s film Les Marches de la Liberté 2013
From Paris to Ferguson ( De Paris à Ferguson : coupables d'être noirs) 2016
African Americans in Paris: James Baldwin and Josephine Baker in the 1930s, but also Angela Davis in the 1960s being perceived as an Algerian
Faiza Guene Just Like Tomorrow (Kif kif demain)

Read and Listen to the episode here.

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Reider Payne, "War and Diplomacy in the Napoleonic Era" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Though Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh remains well known today for his role in shaping the post-Napoleonic peace settlement in Europe, his half-brother Sir Charles Stewart has received far less attention despite his own prominent part in the politics and diplomacy of those years. In War and Diplomacy in the Napoleonic Era: Sir Charles Stewart, Castlereagh and the Balance of Power in Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Reider Payne describes the adventurous life of the third Marquess of Londonderry and the roles he played in the events of his time.

As a young man Charles Stewart initially pursued a career in the military rather than one in politics, and served in the cavalry during Great Britain’s war against revolutionary France in the 1790s. After a brief period in the War Office he resumed his military career and served with the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War. His record as an officer and his relationship with his half-brother led to his appointment as an ambassador – first to Prussia, then to Austria – in which roles he represented Britain at the courts of her most prominent allies during the final stages of the Napoleonic Wars. Though Charles was often better known for his social escapades, he served ably as Britain’s ambassador to Austria until his brother’s suicide in 1822, during which time he was active in both post-Napoleonic diplomacy and the efforts to collect incriminating evidence against Princess Caroline of Brunswick in aid of the Prince Regent’s effort to divorce her.

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Max Hastings, “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975” (Harper, 2018)

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

People of various political stripes in many countries (particularly those countries where various political stripes are allowed) have been arguing about the Vietnam War for a long time. The participants in these debates were (and are) always quick to assign blame in what seems to be an endless attempt to justify “their side” and vilify “the other side.”

In this context, Max Hastings’ new book Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (HarperCollins, 2018) comes as something of a relief, for he essentially says that all the “sides” in the war made a moral mess of things. According to Hastings, the North Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese, the French, and the Americans were all guilty as sin of cynically starting, ruthlessly fighting, and stubbornly continuing a conflict that was, if not “unnecessary,” at least not worth it for any of them. In Hastings’ very readable account, everyone gets their hands very dirty indeed. Listen in.

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Les Sosnowski and Monique Sosnowski, "Operation Crevette: Benin, Mercenaries, and the Survival of a New State" (Lexington Books, 2024)

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Freshly out from under French colonial rule in 1960, the West African nation of Dahomey (now Benin) became home to the largest number of coups d’état in history, earning the reputation of the “sick child of Africa.” Country politics eventually aligned with Marxist and socialist ideologies stimulating French opposition that resulted in mercenary intervention.

Opération Crevette: Benin, Mercenaries, and the Survival of a New State (Lexington Books, 2024) brings together the voices of the involved mercenaries, political rulers, and local witnesses to reveal a struggle for power in the former French colony. Opération Crevette was a mercenary operation which was intended to remove Benin’s eleventh president from power in the 1970s. This book analyzes the political, social, and economic factors that led to this operation, as well as the foreign interference from nations like France and America. Les and Monique Sosnowski provide a unique perspective of international politics, exposing French instigated military intervention and the immense influence Western nations have played in shaping the Africa we know today.

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Benjamin P. Davis, "Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Benjamin P. Davis’s Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics (Edinburgh University Press 2025) provides one of the first readings, in English or French, of Édouard Glissant as an ethical theorist.

What do we in the West owe those who grow our food, sew our clothes and produce our electronics? And what have we always owed one another, but forgotten, avoided, or simply disregarded? Looking back on nearly a century of colonial war and genocide, in 1990 the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant appealed directly to his readers, calling them to re-orient their lives in service of the political struggles of their time: ‘You must choose your bearing.’ Informed by the prayer camps at Standing Rock, and presenting Glissant alongside Stuart Hall, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldúa and W. E. B. Du Bois, this book offers an urgent ethics for the present – an ethics of risk, commitment and care that together form a new sense of decolonial responsibility. A sequel to the book, Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt, is forthcoming this year.

Benjamin P. Davis is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University and a Fellow at the Center on Modernity in Transition. He is the author of Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins (Rowman & Littlefield 2023) as well as Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics (2023) and a sequel, Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt (2025), both published by Edinburgh University Press.

Tim Wyman-McCarthy is a Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights and Associate Director of Graduate Studies at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He can be reached at tw2468@columbia.edu.

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Bruce L. Vernarde, "The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Murder in a cathedral, horrific illnesses and deformities, narrow escapes from injury and death, a vengeful dragon, a wandering eyeball, a bawdy monk and other sinners redeemed—the accounts of miracles performed by the Virgin Mary gathered and translated in The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France (Cornell UP, 2024) provide vivid glimpses into medieval life and beliefs. Bruce L. Venarde provides fluent translations of the first five collections of Marian miracle narratives from France, written in the second quarter of the twelfth century and never before available in English.

The stories recorded in these collections—by Herman of Tournai; Hugh Farsit; Haimo of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives; John, son of Peter; and Gautier of Compiègne—offer descriptions of travel, living conditions, medical knowledge, conflict between and among lay and religious authorities, and the burgeoning cult of the Virgin Mary, which had only recently become important in Western Europe. Including notes, tables, and maps that orient and illuminate the texts, The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France makes these riveting tales available to readers seeking a view into the medieval past.

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Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, "The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It" (Basic Books, 2024)

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A panoramic new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress and reaction went hand in hand.

The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality.

In The Age of Revolutions (Basic Books, 2024), historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era. Through a kaleidoscope of lives both familiar and unknown-from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a seditious Peruvian nun-he retells the revolutionary epic as a generational story. The first revolutionary generation, fired by radical ideas, struggled to slip the hierarchical bonds of the old order. Their failures moulded a second generation, more adept at mass organizing but with an illiberal tint. The sweeping political transformations they accomplished after 1800 engrained forms of inequality and racial hierarchy in modern politics that remain with us today.

A breath taking history spanning three continents, The Age of Revolutions uncovers how the period's grand political transformations emerged across oceans and, slowly and unevenly, over generations.

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a professor of history at the University of Southern California. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Nation, and the Los Angeles Times.

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Holly Grout, "Playing Cleopatra: Inventing the Female Celebrity in Third Republic France" (LSU Press, 2024)

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Questions about the meaning of womanhood and femininity loomed large in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French culture. In Playing Cleopatra: Inventing the Female Celebrity in Third Republic France (LSU Press, 2024), Dr. Holly Grout uses the theater—specifically, Parisian stage performances of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra by Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, and Josephine Baker—to explore these cultural and political debates. How and why did portrayals of Cleopatra influence French attitudes regarding race, sexuality, and gender? To what extent did Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker manipulate the image of Cleopatra to challenge social norms and to generate new models of womanhood? Why was Cleopatra—an ancient, mythologized queen—the chosen vehicle for these spectacular expressions of modern womanhood?

In the context of late nineteenth-century Egyptomania, Cleopatra’s eroticized image—as well as her controversial legacy of female empowerment—resonated in new ways with a French public engaged in reassessing feminine sexuality, racialized beauty, and national identity. By playing Cleopatra, Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker did more than personify a character; they embodied the myriad ways in which celebrity was racialized, gendered, and commoditized, and they generated a model of female stardom that set the stage for twentieth-century celebrity long before the Hollywood machine’s mass manufacture of “stars.” At the same time, these women engaged with broader debates regarding the meaning of womanhood, celebrity, and Frenchness in the tumultuous decades before World War II.

Drawing on plays, periodicals, autobiographies, personal letters, memoirs, novels, works of art, and legislation, Playing Cleopatra contributes to a growing body of literature that examines how individuals subverted the prevailing gender norms that governed relations between the sexes in liberal democratic regimes. By offering employment, visibility, and notoriety, the theater provided an especially empowering world for women, in which the roles they played both reflected and challenged contemporary cultural currents. Through the various iterations in which Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker played Cleopatra, they not only resurrected an ancient queen but also appropriated her mystique to construct new narratives of womanhood.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Andrew Janiak, "The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie Du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2024) introduces the work and legacy of philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet. As the Enlightenment gained momentum throughout Europe, Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Due to her proclamation that a true philosopher must remain an independent thinker rather than a disciple of some supposedly great man like Isaac Newton or René Descartes, Châtelet posed a threat to an emerging consensus in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman highlights the exclusion of women from colleges and academies in Europe and the fear of rupturing the gender-based order.

Andrew Janiak is Professor of Philosophy and Bass Fellow at Duke University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Kirsten L. Scheid, "Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920–1950" (Indiana UP, 2022)

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920–1950 (Indiana UP, 2022), Kirsten L. Scheid offers a striking study of both modern art in Lebanon and modern Lebanon through art. By focusing on the careers of Moustapha Farrouk and Omar Onsi, forefathers of an iconic national repertoire, and their rebellious student Saloua Raouda Choucair, founder of an antirepresentational, participatory art, Scheid traces an emerging sense of what it means to be Lebanese through the evolution of new exhibition, pedagogical, and art-writing practices. She reveals that art and artists helped found the nation during French occupation, as the formal qualities and international exhibitions of nudes and landscapes in the 1930s crystallized notions of modern masculinity, patriotic femininity, non-sectarian religiosity, and citizenship.

Examining the efforts of painters, sculptors, and activists in Lebanon who fiercely upheld aesthetic development and battled for new forms of political being, Fantasmic Objects offers an insightful approach to the history and formation of modern Lebanon.

Yasemin Ipek is an anthropologist, teacher, researcher, and author who is passionate about pursuing peace, love, truth, and justice.

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Ethan Kleinberg, "Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this rich intellectual history of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic lectures in Paris, Ethan Kleinberg addresses Levinas's Jewish life and its relation to his philosophical writings while making an argument for the role and importance of Levinas's Talmudic lessons.

Pairing each chapter with a related Talmudic lecture, Kleinberg uses the distinction Levinas presents between "God on Our Side" and "God on God's Side" to provide two discrete and at times conflicting approaches to Levinas's Talmudic readings. One is historically situated and argued from "our side" while the other uses Levinas's Talmudic readings themselves to approach the issues as timeless and derived from "God on God's own side." In Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought (Stanford UP, 2021), Kleinberg asks whether the ethical message and moral urgency of Levinas's Talmudic lectures can be extended beyond the texts and beliefs of a chosen people, religion, or even the seemingly primary unit of the self.

Touching on Western philosophy, French Enlightenment universalism, and the Lithuanian Talmudic tradition, Kleinberg provides readers with a boundary-pushing investigation into the origins, influences, and causes of Levinas's turn to and use of Talmud.

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Isabel Moreira, "Balthild of Francia: Anglo-Saxon Slave, Merovingian Queen, and Abolitionist Saint" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

This book tells the remarkable life of Balthild of Francia (c. 633-80), a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon slave who became a queen of France. Described in contemporary sources as beautiful and intelligent, she rose to power through her marriage to the short-lived King Clovis II. As regent for her young son, she promoted social and political reforms in Francia that included the rescue and rehousing of Christian slaves who, like Balthild herself, had been caught up in the human-trafficking practices of the mid-seventh century.

Implicated in the violent politics of the era, Balthild spent the remainder of her life in the convent of Chelles where a unique cache of surviving relics and personal items, including her hair, were protected and dispersed as relics over the following centuries. In the nineteenth century, Balthild's anti-slave trade policies were recalled for new audiences when she was adopted as an icon for the cause of the abolition of the slave trade and installed as one of the twenty illustrious women whose statues are situated in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.

Although critical to her age, because of the remote time period and the specialized nature of the sources, Balthild is little known today. Balthild of Francia: Anglo-Saxon Slave, Merovingian Queen, and Abolitionist Saint (Oxford UP, 2024) will correct this oversight by shining a light on a fascinating and courageous figure whose legacy long outlived the era to which she belonged.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review

Isabel Moreira is Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at the University of Utah

Michael Motia teaches in the classics and religious studies department at UMass Boston

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Alcohol

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of High Theory, Nina Studer tells us about alcohol. The restrictions and prohibitions, medical and moral discourses surrounding alcohol reveal a great deal about a given society in a particular historical moment. Nina uses alcohol as a lens to analyze the history of French colonization in North Africa. Who consumed alcohol, in what places, how much, and what kinds, what was viewed as healthy and what was viewed as dangerous, even criminal, can help us approach larger questions of gender, class, and nation.

If you want to learn more, check out her new book, Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France's Most Notorious Drink (McGill-Queens University Press, 2024). The book explores how the mythologizing of one distilled alcohol led to the creation and fabrication of a vast modern folklore. Mystique and moralizing both arose from the spirit’s relationship with empire. Some claim that French soldiers were given daily absinthe rations during France’s military conquest of Algeria to protect them against heat, diseases, and contaminated water. In fact, the overenthusiastic adoption of the drink by these soldiers, and subsequently by French settlers, was perceived as a threat to France’s colonial ambitions - an anxiety that migrated into French medicine. At the height of its popularity in the late nineteenth century, absinthe reigned in the bars, cafés, and restaurants of France and its colonial empire. Yet by the time it was banned in 1915, the famous green fairy had become the green peril, feared for its connection with declining birth rates and its apparent capacity to induce degeneration, madness, and murderous rage in its consumers.

Dr. Nina Studer is a historian working on the 19th and 20th century history of French colonies in North Africa and the Middle East. Her work focuses on the history of drinks, in particular tea, coffee, Fanta/Coca-Cola, Orangina, wine and absinthe. Her doctorate, published as

The Hidden Patients: North African Women in French Colonial Psychiatry (Böhlau, 2015) is available via Open Access. Currently she works as an associate researcher at the Institut Éthique Histoire Humanités at the University of Geneva, part of Dr. Francesca Arena’s team looking into the medical history of wet dreams between the 18th and the 20th century. The SNSF-project has the title: “Nuits polluantes: masculinité et médecine en Suisse et en France (XVIII – XX siècles)”.

The image for this episode is an advertisement for the Algerian wine "Sénéclauze" from 1933, from the personal collection of Nina S. Studer. Many thanks to Nina for sharing it with us.

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Deborah Reed-Donahay, "Sideways Migration: Being French in London" (Routledge, 2025)

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Sideways Migration: Being French in London (Routledge, 2025) examines the relationship between migration and socioeconomic status. In particular, it charts a set of middle-class aspirations that lead people to move to a nearby nation that is similar in wealth and social indicators - a type of horizontal relocation that it terms "sideways migration." It chronicles the experiences of a diverse group of French middle-class citizens who moved to London during the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork over a ten-year period, this book engages at length with their strategies of emplacement through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social space. Against a backdrop of heightened anxieties about immigration, the disruptions of the Brexit process and, more recently, a pandemic, it shows how middle-class migration is affected by processes of dislocation and relocation, settling and unsettling, and the search for belonging. This book points to new directions for understanding transnationalism among middle-class migrants through its consideration of the French emigration apparatus and the role of the multisite French nation in the lives of its citizens living abroad. It will be key reading for scholars and students interested in emigration and migration from anthropology, sociology, geography, political science, history, and international studies.

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Florence Martin, "Farida Benlyazid and Moroccan Cinema" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Farida Benlyazid and Moroccan Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) unfolds and analyzes the work of Moroccan director, producer, and scriptwriter Farida Benlyazid, whose career extends from the beginning of cinema in independent Morocco to the present. This study of her work and career provides a unique perspective on an under-represented cinema, the gender politics of cinema in Morocco, and the contribution of Arab women directors to global cinema and to a gendered understanding of Muslim ethics and aesthetics in film.

A pioneer in Moroccan cinema, Farida Benlyazid has been successful at negotiating the sometimes abrupt turns of Morocco's rocky 20th century history: from Morocco under French occupation to the advent of Moroccan independence in 1956; the end of the international status of Tangier, her native city, in 1959; the "years of lead" under the reign of Hassan II; and finally Mohamed VI's current reign since 1999. As a result, she has a long view of Morocco's politics of self-representation as well as of the representation of Moroccan women on screen.

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Trevor Wilson, "Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy" (Northwestern UP, 2024)

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Trevor Wilson about his new book, Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 2024). Their conversation delves into the intellectual currents of interwar Europe, placing the enigmatic figure of Alexandre Kojève into this unique cultural landscape. The conversation touches on how key philosophical concepts shift in translation, the influence of émigré culture, and the broader currents of Russian philosophy, including the philosophy of Sophia and Kojève’s vision of the "end of history." Dr. Wilson also reflects on the challenges of translating philosophical texts written in multiple languages (and Kojève’s notoriously illegible Russian handwriting).

Beyond philosophy, the conversation explores writing routines and the often-overlooked infrastructures that make academic work possible.

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Erika Graham-Goering et al., "Lordship and the Decentralised State in Late Medieval Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Jana Byars talks to Erika Graham-Goering of the University of Oslo about Lordship and the Decentralized State in Late Medieval Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), which was edited by Graham-Goering, Jim van der Meulen, and Frederik Buylaert. The origins of modern European states are often traced back to the expansion of royal and princely authority in the late Middle Ages, transforming scattered power structures into centralised governments.

Lordship and the Decentralised State in Late Medieval Europe rethinks state formation as a process of decentralisation, exploring how these governments willingly left power to lesser political players. It challenges the assumption that the rise of states made lordship obsolete, showing instead how distributing authority among local lords reinforced the development of new political systems.

The contributors tackle this fresh perspective on lordship and state formation from two complementary angles. Detailed snapshots of lordship in France and the Low Countries assess the political significance of different aspects of lordly power. Historiographical essays discuss frameworks for understanding relationships between lordship and the state in contexts across Europe. These comparative perspectives establish an innovative approach to a key question in political history.

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In Conversation: Decolonial Activism and Islamophobia in France

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Amina Easat-Daas interviews Houria Bouteldja on decolonial activism and Islamophobia in France.

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Davide Panagia, "Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France" (Fordham UP, 2024)

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham University Press) interrogates French history and educational traditions from the Revolution through the postwar period and analyzes the cultural, social, political, and educational parameters that created the space for the French postwar political thinkers. In Sentimental Empiricism, Panagia explores the many directions of critical thought by Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault and how these theorists were pushing against, in many ways, the teleological structure as defined by Aristotle two millennia ago. This contrast in thinking is the heart of the book, helping the reader to consider distinctions between the more fixed classical ideas and a contemporary consideration of dispositionality and revisability.

The research and broader historical sketch in Sentimental Empiricism leads to the thrust of Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience (Northwestern UP, 2024). In Intermedialities (Northwestern UP, 2024), Panagia continues to explore this concept of the revisability of our understanding of the world, and turns the specific focus to film. Film itself, as a medium and as a conveyor of ideas, is rarely at the center of discussions of politics and power. And yet this is the exact place where humans (audiences) can see movement, which is what we are always observing around us to contribute to how we essentially make sense of the world. Intermedialities compels the intertwining of political theory and the theory of film, with encounters between contemporary aesthetic theorists like Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Miriam Hansen, and Jean-Luc Godard and more traditional modern thinkers like David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Simondon. Intermedialities should be of particular interest to political theorists and political scientists since it posits the importance of understanding and thinking about the life and world around us and how we are all connected to taking in this life as movement. The medium of film, which provides us with concepts, images, imaginaries, and perceptions, contributes to so much of our memory and imagination, but is often dismissed as not “real” politics. Panagia and the theorists with whom he is thinking help to tease out the very political nature of the projection of moving images.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Elizabeth Campbell, "Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation, in both the Third Reich and occupied territories. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories in churches, castles, and salt mines. Well publicized restitution cases, such as that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting featured in the film Woman in Gold, illustrate the legacy of Nazi looting in the art world today. But what happened to looted art that was never returned to its rightful owners?

In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, postwar governments appropriated the most coveted unclaimed works for display in museums, embassies, ministries, and other public buildings. Following cultural property norms of the time, the governments created custodianships over the unclaimed pieces, without using archives in their possession to carry out thorough provenance (ownership) research. This policy extended the dispossession of Jewish owners wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators well into the twenty-first century.

The custodianships included more than six hundred works in Belgium, five thousand works in the Netherlands, and some two thousand in France. They included paintings by traditional and modern masters, such as Rembrandt, Cranach, Rubens, Van der Weyden, Tiepolo, Picasso, and Matisse. This appropriation of plundered assets endured without controversy until the mid-1990s, when activists and journalists began challenging the governments' right to hold these items, ushering in a period of cultural property litigation that endures to this day. Including interviews that have never before been published, Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Elizabeth Campbell deftly examines the appropriation of Nazi art plunder by postwar governments and highlights the increasingly successful postwar art recovery and restitution process.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Udo Hock, "The Mysterious Messages of the Other: On the Work of Jean Laplanches" (Psychosozial-Verlag, 2024)

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Udo Hock's Die rätselhaften Botschaften des Anderen. Zum Werk Jean Laplanches (The enigmatic messages of the other. On the work of Jean Laplanche), came out in 2024 with Psychosozial-Verlag, and collectes nine essays that Hock published over the past twenty years. Published in 2024 to celebrate Laplanche's centennial, these papers are a crucial contribution to Laplanche studies from one of its key actors. Hock is not only a reader and commentator of Laplanche, but also an editor and translator of many of Laplanche's German-language translations. Hock has a real eye for the complexities of Laplanche's work, and he thinks Laplanche together with other thinkers such as Žižek or figures of French Theory. Hock is steeped in French Theory and its milieu, of which he himself has been a member for the past forty years. He proposes to psychoanalysis a shift away from its monothematic anglophilia toward an appreciation of the French schools.

I recommend reading closely these essays to anyone capable of reading German. They open up another Laplanche, the Laplanche of linguistic sublety and conceptual ingenuity. All the while Hock offers critical re-examinations of central psychoanalytic notions through his engagment with Laplanchian concepts such as seduction, mytho-symbolism or the message.

The interview itself has a wonderfully explorative and open-ended quality. Hock really embarked on a journey of thinking, when he spoke of Laplanche, Lacan, Klein, and other other ideas central Laplanche's work. i greatly enjoyed this interview for its meditative quality, for the fact that Hock dwelled on topics, excavating what lies beneath the surface.

Interview conducted by Myriam Sauer (in person, so at times the voices may become a bit silent)

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Hélène Tessier, "Laplanche's Vocabulary" (PUF, 2024)

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Vocabulaire de Laplanche (PUF, 2024), edited by the renowned scholar and analyst, Hélène Tessier, several of the key readers of Jean Laplanche's work propose what is nothing short of a revelation for Laplanche studies. Theirs is a vocabulary that provides a concise and accessible dictionary of key Laplanchian terms, inviting readers of Laplanche's work to engage with the French psychoanalyst's work.

In a wide-ranging conversation, professor Tessier delves into Laplanche's work, highlighting the importance of linking/dellinking to his thinking, establishing connections with sublimation and questions of culture and the drives. Tessier embarks on a real tour de force, reconstructing Laplanche's work with the utmost of passion. It was a wonderful conversation that has me ever convinced in stating that this book is a must-have for any Francophone psychoanalyst or scholar of psychonalysis.

Interview conducted by Myriam Sauer.

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The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Henry Christophe was born to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, and fought to overthrow the British in North America before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue—as Haiti was then called—to end slavery. He rose to power and became their king. In his time, he was popular and famous the world over. So how did he become an enigma?

In The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe, Dr. Marlene L. Daut reclaims the life story of this controversial revolutionary and only king of Haiti, drawing from a trove of previously overlooked sources to paint a captivating history of his life and the awe-inspiring kingdom he built. Peeling back the layers of myth and misconception reveals a man driven by both noble ideals and profound flaws, as unforgettable as he is enigmatic. More than just a biography, The First and Last King of Haiti is an exploration of power, ambition, and the human spirit. From his pivotal role in the Haitian Revolution to his coronation as king and eventual demise, this book is testament to the enduring allure of those who dare to defy the odds and shape the course of nations. The First and Last King of Haiti is a story of not only geopolitical clashes on a grand scale but also of friendship and loyalty, treachery and betrayal, heroism and strife in an era of revolutionary upheaval. Slave, revolutionary, traitor, king, and suicide, Henry Christophe was, in his time, popular and famous the world over. Born in 1767 to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, Christophe first fought to overthrow the British in North America, before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then called, to gain their freedom from France. Yet in an incredible twist of fate, Christophe ended up fighting with Napoleon’s forces against the very enslaved men and women he had once fought alongside. Later, euniteng with those he had betrayed, he offered to lead them and made himself their king. But it all came to a sudden and tragic end when Christophe—after nine years of his rule as King Henry I—shot himself in the heart, some say with a silver bullet.

Why did Christophe turn his back on Toussaint Louverture and the very revolution with which his name is so indelibly associated? How did it come to pass that Christophe found himself accused of participating in the plot to assassinate Haiti’s first ruler, Dessalines? What caused Haiti to eventually split into two countries, one ruled by Christophe in the north, who made himself king, the other led by President Pétion in the south?

The First and Last King of Haiti is a riveting story of not only geopolitical clashes on a grand scale but also of friendship and loyalty, treachery and betrayal, heroism and strife in an era of revolutionary upheaval.

Our guest is: Dr. Marlene Daut, who is Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University. Her books include Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism; Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865; Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution; and The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe. She is co-editor of the Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology, and her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, Essence Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The Conversation, New Literary History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Comparative Literature, among others. She is the co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform, H-Haiti.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast.

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Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, "The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Every year, the chilly mistral wind blows through the Rhône valley of southern France, across the Camargue wetlands, and into the Mediterranean Sea. Most forceful when winter turns to spring, the wind knocks over trees, sweeps trains off their tracks, and destroys crops. Yet the mistral turns the sky clear and blue, as it often appears in depictions of Provence. The legendary wind is central to the area’s regional identity and has inspired artists and writers near and far for centuries.

This force of nature is the focus of Dr. Catherine Dunlop’s The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2024), a wonderfully written examination of the power of the mistral wind, and in particular, the ways it challenged central tenets of nineteenth-century European society: order, mastery, and predictability. As Dunlop shows, while the modernizing state sought liberation from environmental realities through scientific advances, land modification, and other technological solutions, the wind blew on, literally crushing attempts at control, and becoming increasingly integral to regional feelings of place and community.

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Emily Marker, "Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Thinking together the histories of European integration and African decolonization, Emily Marker's Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era (Cornell University Press, 2022) is a pathbreaking study of how the two continents continued to make one another's histories in the years after the Second World War. Tracking the ways that young people and education figured in plans for the future of both the French empire and of an integrated Europe, the book pursues archival traces and arguments that illuminate continuing debates about race, religion, inclusion, national, and transnational identities.

Pursuing policies and programs aimed at French imperial reform and renewal alongside attempts to inculcate a sense of Europeanness in a new generation of transnational citizens, Marker's chapters examine the contours of a postwar vision of a united Europe understood as at once "colorblind" and white, secular and Christian. When African students made claims for greater equality, they faced a "postwar racial common sense" that pointed up the limits of French and African solidarity in an era of decolonization.

Drawing on an impressive body of research, Black France, White Europe will be of tremendous interest to scholars of France, Africa, and Europe. The book is a compelling history of the present that connects contemporary debates about race, religion, and belonging to a longer durée of national, transnational, imperial, and postcolonial worldmaking. I hope listeners will enjoy our conversation as much as I did!

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Stuart Elden, "The Early Foucault" (Polity Press, 2021)

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

What were the key ideas and influences on Michel Foucault’s early career? In The Early Foucault (Polity Press, 2021), Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick and author of the Progressive Geographies blog, charts Foucault’s formative intellectual years leading up to the publication of the ground-breaking The History of Madness. The book uses a range of new archival material, much of which has been only recently accessible, to show the influence of teachers, mentors, and colleagues, as well as Foucault’s practice as an academic and writer during the 1950s and early 1960s. Telling the story of the possible intellectual trajectories, in psychology and philosophy, Foucault might have followed, along with a clear examination of the roots of his later work, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences.

Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

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Camille Robcis, "Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews scholar and historian Camille Robcis. In her most recent book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, psychiatric and psychoanalytic meaning of institutional psychotherapy as articulated at Saint-Alban Hospital in France by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.

J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work currently living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at jmull@smith.edu.

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Jessica Namakkal, "Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered territories governed by the French imperial state. It was not until 1962 that France fully relinquished control. Once decolonization took hold across the subcontinent, Western-led ashrams and utopian communities remained in and around the former French territory of Pondicherry—most notably the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Auroville experimental township, which continue to thrive and draw tourists today.

Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India (Columbia UP, 2021) presents a new account of the history of twentieth-century French India to show how colonial projects persisted beyond formal decolonization. Through the experience of the French territories, Jessica Namakkal recasts the relationships among colonization, settlement, postcolonial sovereignty, utopianism, and liberation, considering questions of borders, exile, violence, and citizenship from the margins. She demonstrates how state-sponsored decolonization—the bureaucratic process of transferring governance from an imperial state to a postcolonial state—rarely aligned with local desires. Namakkal examines the colonial histories of the Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville, arguing that their continued success shows how decolonization paradoxically opened new spaces of settlement, perpetuating imperial power. Challenging conventional markers of the boundaries of the colonial era as well as nationalist narratives, Unsettling Utopia sheds new light on the legacies of colonialism and offers bold thinking on what decolonization might yet mean.

Jessica Namakkal is assistant professor of the practice in international comparative studies at Duke University.

Samee Siddiqui is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945.

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Robert Darnton, "Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In the late-18th century, a group of publishers in what historian Robert Darnton calls the "Fertile Crescent" — countries located along the French border, stretching from Holland to Switzerland — pirated the works of prominent (and often banned) French writers and distributed them in France, where laws governing piracy were in flux and any notion of "copyright" very much in its infancy. Piracy was entirely legal and everyone acknowledged — tacitly or openly — that these pirated editions of works by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot, among other luminaries, supplied a growing readership within France, one whose needs could not be met by the monopolistic and tightly controlled Paris Guild.

Darnton's book Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment (Oxford UP, 2021) focuses principally on a publisher in Switzerland, one of the largest and whose archives are the most complete. Through the lens of this concern, he offers a sweeping view of the world of writing, publishing, and especially bookselling in pre-Revolutionary France--a vibrantly detailed inside look at a cut-throat industry that was struggling to keep up with the times and, if possible, make a profit off them. Featuring a fascinating cast of characters — lofty idealists and down-and-dirty opportunists — this new book expands upon on Darnton's celebrated work on book-publishing in France, most recently found in Literary Tour de France. Pirating and Publishing reveals how and why piracy brought the Enlightenment to every corner of France, feeding the ideas that would explode into revolution.

Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.

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Emily Herring, "Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People" (Basic Books, 2024)

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (Basic Books, 2024) is the first English-language biography of Henri Bergson, the philosopher who defined individual creativity and transformed twentieth century thought.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Henri Bergson became the most famous philosopher on earth. Where prior thinkers sketched out a predictable universe, he asserted the transformative power of consciousness and creativity. An international celebrity, he made headlines around the world debating luminaries like Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein about free will and time. The vision of creative evolution and freedom he presented was so disruptive that the New York Times branded him "the most dangerous man in the world."

In the first English-language biography of Bergson, Emily Herring traces how his celebration of the time-bending uniqueness of individual experience struck a chord with those shaken by modern technological and social change. Bergson captivated a society in flux like no other. Long after he faded from public view, his insights into memory, time, joy and creativity continue to shape our perceptions to this day. Herald of a Restless World is an electrifying portrait of a singular intellect.

Emily Herring is a writer based in Paris. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and received her PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. Her work has appeared in the TLS and Aeon.

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Peter Salmon, "An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida" (Verso, 2020)

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Who is Jacques Derrida? For some, he is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic critics, he reduced French philosophy to “little more than an object of ridicule.” For his fans, he is an intellectual rock star who ranged across literature, politics, and linguistics. In An Event, Perhaps (Verso, 2020), Peter Salmon presents this misunderstood and misappropriated figure as a deeply humane and urgent thinker for our times.

Born in Algiers, the young Jackie was always an outsider. Despite his best efforts, he found it difficult to establish himself among the Paris intellectual milieu of the 1960s. However, in 1967, he changed the whole course of philosophy: outlining the central concepts of deconstruction. Immediately, his reputation as a complex and confounding thinker was established. Feted by some, abhorred by others, Derrida had an exhaustive breadth of interests but, as Salmon shows, was moved by a profound desire to understand how we engage with each other. It is a theme explored through Derrida’s intimate relationships with writers such even as Althusser, Genet, Lacan, Foucault, Cixous, and Kristeva. Accessible, provocative and beautifully written, An Event, Perhaps will introduce a new readership to the life and work of a philosopher whose influence over the way we think will continue long into the twenty-first century.

Peter Salmon is an Australian writer living in the UK. His first novel, The Coffee Story, was a New Statesman Book of the Year. He has written for the Guardian, the New Humanist, the Sydney Review of Books and Tablet, as well as Australian TV and radio. Formerly Centre Director of the Jon Osborne/The Hurst Arvon Centre, he also teaches creative writing.

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Jan Machielsen, "The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In June 1609, two judges left Bordeaux for a territory at the very edge of their jurisdiction, a Basque-speaking province on the Atlantic coast called the Pays de Labourd. In four months, they executed up to 80 women and men for the crime of witchcraft, causing a wave of suspects to flee into Spain and sparking terror there. Witnesses, many of them children, described lurid tales of cannibalism, vampirism, and demonic sex. One of the judges, Pierre de Lancre, published a sensationalist account of this diabolical netherworld. With other accounts seemingly destroyed, this witch-hunt – France's largest – has always been seen through de Lancre's eyes. The narrative, re-told over the centuries, is that of a witch-hunt caused by a bigoted outsider.

Newly discovered evidence paints a very different, still darker picture, revealing a secret history underneath de Lancre's well-known tale. Far from an outside imposition, witchcraft was a home-grown problem. Panic had been building up over a number of years and the region was fractured by factionalism and a struggle over scarce resources. The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Jan Machielsen reveals that de Lancre was no outsider; he was a local partisan, married into the Basque nobility. Living at the Franco-Spanish border, the Basques were victims of geography. Geo-politics caused a local conflict which made the witch-hunt inevitable. The same forces eventually sent thousands of religious refugees from Spain to France where they, in turn, became new objects of popular fear and anger.

The Basque witch-hunt is justly infamous. This book shows that almost everything historians thought they knew about it is wrong.

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Marlene L. Daut, "The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe" (Knopf, 2025)

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025) is the essential biography of the controversial rebel, traitor, and only king of Haiti. Henry Christophe is one of the most richly complex figures in the history of the Americas, and was, in his time, popular and famous the world over: in The First and Last King of Haiti, a brilliant, award-winning Yale scholar unravels the still controversial enigma that he was. Slave, revolutionary, traitor, king, and suicide, Henry Christophe was, in his time, popular and famous the world over. Born in 1767 to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, Christophe first fought to overthrow the British in North America, before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then called, to gain their freedom from France. Yet in an incredible twist of fate, Christophe ended up fighting with Napoleon’s forces against the very enslaved men and women he had once fought alongside. Later, reuniting with those he had betrayed, he offered to lead them and made himself their king. But it all came to a sudden and tragic end when Christophe—after nine years of his rule as King Henry I—shot himself in the heart, some say with a silver bullet. Why did Christophe turn his back on Toussaint Louverture and the very revolution with which his name is so indelibly associated? How did it come to pass that Christophe found himself accused of participating in the plot to assassinate Haiti’s first ruler, Dessalines? What caused Haiti to eventually split into two countries, one ruled by Christophe in the north, who made himself king, the other led by President Pétion in the south? The First and Last King of Haiti is a riveting story of not only geopolitical clashes on a grand scale but also of friendship and loyalty, treachery and betrayal, heroism and strife in an era of revolutionary upheaval.

Marlene Daut is Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University.

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Richard J. Golsan, "Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France's First Trial for Crimes Against Humanity" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The trial of former SS lieutenant and Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie was France's first trial for crimes against humanity. Known as the "Butcher of Lyon" during the Nazi occupation of that city from 1942 to 1944, Barbie tortured, deported, and murdered thousands of Jews and Resistance fighters. Following a lengthy investigation and the overcoming of numerous legal and other obstacles, the trial began in 1987 and attracted global attention.

Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France's First Trial for Crimes Against Humanity (U Toronto Press, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of the Barbie trial, including the investigation leading up to it, the legal background to the case, and the hurdles the prosecution had to clear in order to bring Barbie to justice. Richard J. Golsan examines the strategies used by the defence, the prosecution, and the lawyers who represented Barbie's many victims at the trial. The book draws from press coverage, articles, and books about Barbie and the trial published at the time, as well as recently released archival sources and the personal archives of lawyers at the trial.

Making the case that, despite the views of its many critics, the Barbie trial was a success in legal, historical, and pedagogical terms, Justice in Lyon details how the trial has had a positive impact on French and international law governing crimes against humanity.

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George Steinmetz, "The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

It is only in recent years that sociologists and historians of the social sciences have given empire the attention it deserves in histories of the discipline. In this context, George Steinmetz’s The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton University Press) is likely to be a touchstone text in these debates. Providing a new history of the French national discipline inspired by a ‘Neo-Bourdieusian Historical Sociology of Science’, Steinmetz highlights the centrality of ‘colonial sociology’, work centered on and/or created in the French overseas colonies and protectorates to the discipline’s development.

The French state, eager to consolidate its empire after World War II, were eager to draw on the expertise of sociologists in pursuing this goal; as Steinmetz shows therefore, during this period, a focus on ‘the colonial’ became central to French sociology to the extent that roughly half the French sociological field could be considered ‘colonial sociologists’. Despite this entanglement with the French state these colonial sociologists became strong critics of imperialism. Alongside the many stories he uncovers Steinmetz explores in depth the case of four such colonial sociologists: Raymond Aron, Jacque Berque, Georges Balandier and Pierre Bourdieu, seeking to show not just the centrality of colonialism to each writer but how their experiences of empire formed their basis for their future work; for example, how Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field can be traced to his experiences in colonial Algeria.

In our discussion, which also marks the imminent release of the text in paperback, George takes us through this hugely enlightening text, including reflections on why there may have been some ‘disciplinary amnesia’ in sociology’s unwillingness to confront empire, the relations between sociology and other imperial disciplines, how sociologists from the colonies developed their own work, the lessons from his text about how we should confront colonial sociologists and whether Durkheim had an ‘imperial gaze’.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and is the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), among other books.

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Geneviève Rousselière, "Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The French have long self-identified as champions of universal emancipation, yet the republicanism they adopted has often been faulted for being exclusionary – of women, foreigners, and religious and ethnic minorities. Can republicanism be an attractive alternative to liberalism, communism, and communitarianism, or is it fundamentally flawed?

Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the development of republicanism from an older elitist theory of freedom into an inclusive theory of emancipation during the French Revolution. It uncovers the theoretical innovations of Rousseau and of revolutionaries such as Sieyès, Robespierre, Condorcet, and Grouchy. We learn how they struggled to adapt republicanism to the new circumstances of a large and diverse France, full of poor and dependent individuals with little education or experience of freedom. Analysing the argumentative logic that led republicans to justify the exclusion of many, this book renews the republican tradition and connects it with the enduring issues of colonialism, immigration, slavery, poverty and gender.

Geneviève Rousselière is a Franco-American political theorist. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the co-editor of Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

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Rachel Hope Cleves, "Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex" (Polity, 2024)

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

We take the edible trappings of flirtation for granted: chocolate covered strawberries and romance, oysters on the half shell and desire, the eggplant emoji and a suggestive wink. But why does it feel so natural for us to link food and sexual pleasure? In Lustful Appetites: an Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex (Polity, 2024), Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves explores the long association between indulging in good food and an appetite for naughty sex, from the development of the Parisian restaurant as a place for men to meet with prostitutes and mistresses, to the role of sexual outlaws like bohemians, new women, lesbians and gay men in creating epicurean culture in Britain and the United States. Taking readers on a gastronomic journey from Paris and London to New York, Chicago and San Francisco, Lustful Appetites reveals how this preoccupation changed the ways we eat and the ways we are intimate―while also creating stigmas that persist well into our own twenty-first century.

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Cindy Ermus, "The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

This episode features a conversation with Dr. Cindy Ermus on her recently published book, The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Published by Cambridge University Press, The Great Plague Scare of 1720 follows the Plague of Provence from 1720 to 1722 to understand new forms of contagion and its management. As one of the last major epidemics of the plague to strike Western Europe, the Plague of Provence generated a public health crisis that impacted the social, commercial, and diplomatic choices of France, which eventually spread the public health crisis to Italy, Great Britain, Spain, and their overseas colonies. In this transnational, transoceanic study, The Great Plague Scare of 1720 reveals how crisis in one part of the globe transcends geographic boundaries and influences society, politics, and public health policy in regions far from the epicenter of disaster.

Cindy Ermus is the Charles and Linda Wilson Associate Professor in the History of Medicine, and Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She specializes in the history of medicine and the environment, especially catastrophe and public health crisis management, in eighteenth-century France and the Atlantic World. In addition to The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2023), she is also the author of Urban Disasters (Cambridge UP, 2023). Currently, she is at work on a co-authored global history of epidemics (with Claire Edington). Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Verge, Stat News, and The Miami Herald, and she has been a guest on BBC World News, Univision, Al-Jazeera, and others. She is also co-series editor for France Overseas of the University of Nebraska Press, and co-founder and co-executive editor for the digital, open-access publication AgeofRevolutions.com.

Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a research assistant professor in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Isidro Gonzalez (he/him) is a pre-doctoral fellow of History at Claremont McKenna College.

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Theara Thun, "Epistemology of the Past: Texts, History, and Intellectuals of Cambodia, 1855–1970" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Cambodian history most people have heard of the great Khmer empire of Angkor, and the radical communist regime of the Khmer Rouge. But who has heard of the famous story of the sweet cucumber farmer who became king of Cambodia in the fourteenth century?

In this original book, Epistemology of the Past: Texts, History, and Intellectuals of Cambodia, 1855–1970 (U Hawaii Press, 2024), Theara Thun traces the development of Cambodian historiography, from the royal chronicle tradition of premodern times to modern histories based on Western historical methods introduced by French colonial scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Theara discusses the intellectuals – Khmer, French, and maybe surprisingly even Thai - who helped shaped modern Cambodian history writing. He shows that indigenous Cambodian historiographical traditions survive in the present in surprising forms. This is an important contribution to an emerging scholarship on Southeast Asian intellectual history.

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Caroline Séquin, "Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848-1950" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Since the French Revolution of 1789, the absence of laws banning interracial marriages has served to reinforce two myths about modern France--first, that it is a sexual democracy and second, it is a color-blind nation where all French citizens can freely marry whomever they wish regardless of their race. Caroline Séquin challenges the narrative of French exceptionalism by revealing the role of prostitution regulation in policing intimate relationships across racial and colonial boundaries in the century following the abolition of slavery.

Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848-1950 (Cornell UP, 2024) traces the rise and fall of the "French model" of prostitution policing in the "contact zones" of port cities and garrison towns across France and in Dakar, Senegal, the main maritime entry point of French West Africa. Séquin describes how the regulation of prostitution covertly policed racial relations and contributed to the making of white French identity in an imperial nation-state that claimed to be race-blind. She also examines how sex industry workers exploited, reinforced, or transgressed the racial boundaries of colonial rule.

Brothels served as "gatekeepers of whiteness" in two arenas. In colonial Senegal, white-only brothels helped deter French colonists from entering unions with African women and producing mixed-race children, thus consolidating white minority rule. In the metropole, brothels condoned interracial sex with white sex workers while dissuading colonial men from forming long-term attachments with white French women. Ultimately, brothels followed a similar racial logic that contributed to upholding white supremacy.

Dr. Séquin earned a BA and MA in English and American Studies at Université Nancy 2, an MA in Women and Gender Studies at Université Paris 8, and her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. She has won a number of awards from a range of institutions including Best Paper Prize from the Council for European Studies’ Gender and Sexuality Research Network for the article “Marie Piquemal, the ‘Colonial Madam’: Brothel Prostitution, Migration, and the Making of Whiteness in Interwar Dakar”. But I want to call attention to her Edward T. Gargan Prize for the best graduate student paper presented on post-1800 history at the annual conference of the Western Society for French History. Since 2019 she has been an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Lafayette College.

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Micah Alpaugh, "The People's Revolution of 1789" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Micah Alpaugh argues that the forgotten actors in the French Revolution are the French people themselves. Sure, are numerous ways in which we today recall the French Revolution – Enlightened ideals, the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the Terror of 1794, the Directorate, the intrigues of Napoleon – but often forgotten are the people, their gripes, and their movement, especially in the formative years of 1788 and 1789.

In The People’s Revolution of 1789 (Cornell UP, 2024), Paris and the provincial France come alive. The Third Estate led the way, not the philosophes, not Court intrigues and empty treasury accounts, but a true desire for reform. Alpaugh’s work clearly shows the people’s desire to break the yoke of feudalism in the provinces, the hope of ending authoritarian decrees, the eagerness toward liberty, and the birth of a new France at home and in its colonial possessions.

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Laure Astourian, "The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema" (Indiana UP, 2024)

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema (Indiana UP, 2024) traces the surprising role of ethnography in French cinema in the 1960s and examines its place in several New Wave fictions and cinéma vérité documentaries during the final years of the French colonial empire. Focusing on prominent French filmmakers Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais, author Laure Astourian elucidates their striking pivot from centering their work on distant lands to scrutinizing their own French urban culture. As awareness of the ramifications of the shrinking empire grew within metropolitan France, these filmmakers turned inward what their similarly white, urban, bourgeois predecessors had long turned outward toward the colonies: the ethnographic gaze. Featuring some of the most canonical and best-loved films of the French tradition, such as Breathless and La Jetée, this is an essential book for readers interested in national identity and cinema.

Here's the link to Astourian's essay on Jean Rouch's Moi, Un Noir discussed in the podcast.

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Amín Pérez, "Bourdieu and Sayad Against Empire: Forging Sociology in Anticolonial Struggle" (Polity Press, 2023)

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How did the Algerian war of independence shape contemporary sociology? In Bourdieu and Sayad Against Empire: Forging Sociology in Anticolonial Struggle (Polity Press, 2023), Amin Perez, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Quebec in Montreal, explores the sociological practice and friendship of Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad. Using a range of archival and contemporary methods, the book shows the impact of anticolonialism on these key figures in sociology and demonstrates the ongoing importance of their work today. Theoretically and historically rich, as well as being accessible, the book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities.

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Islamophobia, France and Muslim Political Subjectivity

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this interview, recorded for Islamophobia Awareness Month, Hizer Mir and Chella Ward talk to Kawtar Najib and Rayan Freschi about Islamophobia in France. They discuss why France is a special case and how its policies of ‘systematic obstruction’ hinder the lives of Muslims and contribute to global Islamophobia.

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Doyle D. Calhoun, "The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire" (Duke UP, 2024)

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

A note about content:

This episode involves discussion of suicide, specifically in the contexts of slavery, colonization and empire. Please use your discretion and take care if you decide to listen. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, you are not alone. You can reach out to the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988 or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. Thank you for taking care of yourself.

This episode is a conversation with Dr. Doyle Calhoun, University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He is key academic staff in the Film and Screen Studies Program and a Fellow of Peterhouse. A scholar of African and Caribbean literatures and cinemas, particularly in Senegal, Dr. Calhoun’s first book, The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire was published in October 2024 by Duke University Press.

“There is no good way to talk about suicide,” Calhoun says in the opening line of his book. He repeats it early on in our conversation. Studying a topic that is personally and emotionally fraught – no less in history than in the present – and is often left unaddressed in traditional archives and explored by scholars is no easy feat. And yet Calhoun does this with care and caution and respect. The Suicide Archive is a study of suicidal resistance to slavery, colonialism, and empire in the French Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds via an array of aesthetic works (novels, plays, poems, films, photography) that consider the absence of archives as an opportunity to produce new and alternative forms of historical knowledge. In doing so, Doyle provides a nuanced and compelling analysis of the aesthetic treatment of historic suicides that take us from Guadeloupe to Senegal, from Paris to Algeria and Morocco. A methodologically innovative work, the book models how we might explore the historical potential “of reading aesthetic forms as archives,” as he puts it while recognizing the importance of suicide as a form of resistance to the violence and oppression of sub-alternity.

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Alistaire Tallent, "Fictions of Pleasure: The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France" (U Delaware Press, 2023)

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Alistaire Tallent joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Fictions of Pleasure: The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France (University of Delaware Press, 2024). Out of the libertine literary tradition of eighteenth-century France emerged over a dozen memoir novels of female libertines who eagerly take up sex work as a means of escape from the patriarchal control of fathers and husbands to pursue pleasure, wealth, and personal independence outside the private, domestic sphere. In these anonymously published novels, the heroines proudly declare themselves prostitutes, or putains, and use the desire they arouse, the professional skills they develop, and the network of female friends they create to exploit, humiliate, and financially ruin wealthy and powerful men. In pursuing their desires, the putains challenge contemporary notions of womanhood and expose the injustices of ancien-régime France. Until the French Revolution spelled the end of the genre, these novels proposed not only an appealing libertine utopia in which libertine women enjoy the same benefits as their male counterparts but also entirely new ways of looking at systems of power, gender, and sexuality.

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Eric Helleiner, "The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (Cornell UP, 2021) helps make sense of the protectionist turn, providing the first intellectual history of the genealogy of neomercantilism. Eric Helleiner identifies many pioneers of this ideology between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries who backed strategic protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state wealth and power. They included not just the famous Friedrich List, but also numerous lesser-known thinkers, many of whom came from outside of the West.

Helleiner's novel emphasis on neomercantilism's diverse origins challenges traditional Western-centric understandings of its history. It illuminates neglected local intellectual traditions and international flows of ideas that gave rise to distinctive varieties of the ideology around the globe, including in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. This rich history left enduring intellectual legacies, including in the two dominant powers of the contemporary world economy: China and the United States.

The result is an exceptional study of a set of profoundly influential economic ideas. While rooted in the past, it sheds light on the present moment. The Neomercantilists shows how we might construct more global approaches to the study of international political economy and intellectual history, devoting attention to thinkers from across the world, and to the cross-border circulation of thought.

Eric Helleiner is an author and professor of political science and the Faculty of Arts Chair in International Political Economy at the University of Waterloo.

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Michael G. Vann, "The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2018)

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A funny thing happened to historian Michael Vann* on the way to his PhD thesis. While he was doing his research on French colonialism and the urbanist project in Hanoi, he came across an intriguing dossier: “Destruction of animals in the city”. The documents he found started him on a research path that led to a section of his dissertation, then an article that gained a wide academic and non-academic readership, and now The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford UP, 2018). But this isn’t your typical historical monograph. One of the latest volumes in Oxford University Press’s Graphic History Series, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt (with illustrations by Liz Clarke), explores the history of modernization, urbanization, and the spread of epidemic disease in the era of “New Imperialism” in an exciting and highly engaging format.

The remaking of Hanoi as a capital of French empire from the end of the nineteenth century had unintended consequences. In the state-of-the-art sewers of the French/white areas of the city, rats found the perfect home. Then came the Third plague pandemic, the disease that travelled with rats and moved from one site to another around the globe…on railroads, ships, the growing networks of trade and empire. The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt mobilizes years of research about this episode in the city’s history, illustrating (literally!) the inherent contradictions of imperialism, and the complexities of domination and resistance in a colonial context. Framed as an undergraduate lecture that features the author as a character throughout the narrative, the book is set up with teaching in mind. In addition to the fascinating story of the rat hunt itself (and all the twists and turns involved), the volume includes a rich selection of primary sources and a series of contextual essays that will allow students to explore this history in a range of productive ways. An accessible book that is at once serious and fun, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt was such a pleasure to read and to talk about. I hope listeners will enjoy my conversation with Mike as much as I did!

*Mike is also a host on New Books in History! Be sure to check out his interviews here on the network.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Sonja Stojanovic, "Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction in French" (Liverpool UP, 2023)

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction in French (Liverpool UP, 2023) is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains.

The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers’ investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the memories and legacies of violence that have marked the greater part of the twentieth-century – in Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, France, and Rwanda – this book traces absences, disappearances and reappearances, textual omissions and untimely irruptions to posit literature’s power to both remember and communicate beyond the bounds of chronological time. Through close readings of recent fiction by Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gaël Faye, Jérôme Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leïla Sebbar, and Cécile Wajsbrot, Mind the Ghost articulates the mechanisms through which readers themselves become haunted.

Maureen G. Shanahan, J.D., PhD is Professor of Art History, School of Art, Design & Art History, James Madison University

Machine Modernisms, Masculinity, and the Trauma of War: The Art of Fernand Léger (Penn State University Press, May 2024).

Colonial Wounds / Postcolonial Repair, exhibition catalog (University of Virginia 2019)

Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon (University Press of Florida 2016)

LINKED IN.

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Amanda Shoaf Vincent, "Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City: Paris's New Parks, 1977-1995" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the space of about two decades, five major parks were proposed, designed, and created in Paris. Some emerged from competitions between professional landscape architects, others were imagined by planners working for the city, all represented a shift in what Amanda Shoaf Vincent calls “post-modern” understandings of the role of parks and garden in the city.

In Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City: Paris's New Parks, 1977-1995 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Vincent explores the development of parks as “cultural objects” in Paris’ urban landscape, helping students and scholars of urbanism, architecture, and social and cultural history understand how parks served not only as places where people could sit, read a book, or watch their children play, but also as places where new theories about leisure and life in the city played out. In our conversation, Vincent explains how she developed this study out of a broader interest in architecture and urban space and takes listeners through each of the major parks that are the focus of her book: from Maine-Montparnasse high above the Montparnasse train station on the Left Bank to Les Halles in the center of Paris to the Park de Bercy, just a short walk away from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Along the way, we talk about gardeners, ironwork, and a surprising lack of park scandals in the City of Light and learn to “take parks a little more seriously,” as Vincent herself has learned to do.

Amanda Shoaf Vincent is Associate Professor in the Department of French Studies at Wake Forest University. Her research focuses on the representation and production of designed spaces (from parks to gardens to cities and buildings) in twentieth and twenty-first century France. Her work has previously appeared in French Cultural Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and Contemporary French Civilization, among other venues.

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Anne Higonnet, "Liberty Equality Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution" (Norton, 2024)

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, had nothing left to lose. After surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, they dared sartorial revolt. Together, Joséphine and Térézia shed the underwear cages and massive, rigid garments that women had been obliged to wear for centuries. They slipped into light, mobile dresses, cropped their hair short, wrapped themselves in shawls, and championed the handbag. Juliette made the new style stand for individual liberty.

The erotic audacity of these fashion revolutionaries conquered Europe, starting with Napoleon. Everywhere a fashion magazine could reach, women imitated the news coming from Paris. It was the fastest and most total change in clothing history. Two centuries ahead of its time, it was rolled back after only a decade by misogynist rumors of obscene extravagance.

As Dr. Anne Higonnet shows in Liberty, Equality, Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution (Norton, 2024), new evidence allows the real fashion revolution to be told. This is a story for our time: of a revolution that demanded universal human rights, of self-creation, of women empowering each other, and of transcendent glamor.

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Jacques Bertrand, "Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar (Southeast Asia Program Publications/Cornell UP, 2022) asks why the peace process stalled in the decade from 2011 to 2021 despite a liberalizing regime, a national ceasefire agreement, and a multilateral peace dialogue between the state and ethnic minorities.

Winning by Process argues that stalled conflicts are more than pauses or stalemates. "Winning by process," as opposed to winning by war or agreement, represents the state's ability to gain advantage by manipulating the rules of negotiation, bargaining process, and sites of power and resources. In Myanmar, five such strategies allowed the state to gain through process: locking in, sequencing, layering, outflanking, and outgunning. The Myanmar case shows how process can shift the balance of power in negotiations intended to bring an end to civil war. During the last decade, the Myanmar state and military controlled the process, neutralized ethnic minority groups, and continued to impose their vision of a centralized state even as they appeared to support federalism.

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Helena Taylor, "Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 04:00:00 -0000

Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2024) recounts women authors' struggle to define the female intellectual through their engagement with the classical world in early modern France. Bringing together the fields of classical reception and women writers, Helena Taylor looks at various female novelists, translators, poets, playwrights, and essayists to see how they both reacted to and in turn shaped cultural discourses, especially around learned women and the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns. From Marie de Gournay's polemic translations to the conteuses fairy tales, Greco-Roman culture provided inspiration, authorization, and means of self-fashioning for a wide range of women writers.

Women Writing Antiquity is perfect for readers interested in classical reception, women's writers, authorial strategies, gender history, and French literature.

Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.

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Francesco Piraino, "Sufism in Europe: Islam, Esotericism and the New Age" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Francesco Piraino’s Sufism in Europe: Islam, Esotericism and the New Age (University of Edinburgh Press, 2024) is a vital contribution to the growing field of Sufism in the Global North which often encompasses studies of North America and western Europe. This monograph study, the first focused study of Sufism in Italy and France, uses ethnographic data and sociological analysis to map and situate various Sufi communities in Paris and Milan, along with transnational flows of these communities across Morocco, Algeria, and Cyprus.

At the heart of these case studies is the question of how to approach and study Sufi communities across an ever diversifying social, religious/spiritual, and political landscape and across categorical commitments such as New Age, New Religious Movements, esotericism, diasporic Islam, Traditionalism and mysticism. Piraino argues for the limitations and utilities of these various categories, and ultimately helps us shift our focus to to the everyday embodied ebbs and flows of a variety of Italian and French Sufi communities to showcase how these terms should be used with fluidity to reflect the lived realities of his interlocutors. This book will be of interest to scholars of contemporary Sufism, sociology of Islam, contemporary Islam, Islam in Europe and much more.

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Julia Caterina Hartley, "Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France" (Bloomsbury. 2023)

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Julia Caterina Hartley about Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France (Bloomsbury. 2023).

New translations of Persian literature into French, the invention of the Aryan myth, increased travel between France and Iran, and the unveiling of artefacts from ancient Susa at the Louvre Museum are among the factors that radically altered France's perception of Iran during the long nineteenth century. And this is reflected in the literary culture of the period. In an ambitious study spanning poetry, historiography, fiction, travel-writing, ballet, opera, and marionette theatre, Julia Hartley reveals the unique place that Iran held in the French literary imagination between 1829 and 1912. Iran's history and culture remained a constant source of inspiration across different generations and artistic movements, from the 'Oriental' poems of Victor Hugo to those of Anna de Noailles and Théophile Gautier's strategic citation of Persian poetry to his daughter Judith Gautier's full-blown rewriting of a Persian epic. Writing about Iran could also serve to articulate new visions of world history and religion, as was the case in the intellectual debates that took place between Michelet, Renan, and Al-Afghani. Alternatively joyous, as in Félicien David's opera Lalla Roukh, and ominous, as in Massenet's Le Mage, Iran elicited a multiplicity of treatments.

This is most obvious in the travelogues of Flandin, Gobineau, Loti, Jane Dieulafoy, and Marthe Bibesco, which describe the same cities and cultural practices in altogether different ways. Under these writers' pens, Iran emerges as both an Oriental other and an alter ego, its culture elevated above that of all other Muslim nations. At times this led French writers to critique notions of European superiority. But at others, they appropriated Iran as proto-European through racialist narratives that reinforced Orientalist stereotypes. Drawing on theories of Orientalism and cultural difference, this book navigates both sides of this fascinating and complex literary history. It is the first major study on the subject.

Julia Hartley is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow. She was previously Laming Fellow at the Queen’s College Oxford and Edward W. Said Visiting Fellow at Columbia University. She is the author of Reading Dante and Proust by Analogy (2019) and peer-reviewed articles in Iranian Studies and Nineteenth-Century French Studies.

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Christian Wolmar, "The Liberation Line: The Untold Story of How American Engineering and Ingenuity Won World War II" (Hachette, 2024)

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

They certainly were not soldiers, yet they suddenly found themselves in uniform, in a foreign land. But, as locomotive drivers, track-workers, conductors, porters, signalmen and engine cleaners, they knew how to run trains. And their job was to bring them back to life.

The Liberation Line: The Untold Story of How American Engineering and Ingenuity Won World War II (Hachette, 2024) by Christian Wolmar tells the thrilling story of the British and American railway engineers who, in the months after D-Day, worked around the clock and in great danger to rebuild the ravaged railways of Europe and keep the Allied forces fuelled as they pushed on into Germany. As territory was taken, these soldier-railroaders were close behind, rebuilding the lines, putting up telegraph wires, replacing bridges and laying track, all the while dodging bullets, shells and booby traps.

Tales of extraordinary feats and heroism abound, including how 10,000 men rebuilt a 135-mile-long railway in just three days; the reconstruction of the bridge over the Seine in two weeks while under bombardment; and the use of cigarette lighters as improvised signalling systems. Despite being critical to Allied victory, the role of the railwaymen has been largely forgotten or ignored. In a vivid and gripping narrative, Christian Wolmar brings to life this colourful cast of generals and engineers, without whose extraordinary bravery the liberation of France and invasion of Germany might well have foundered – and the course of history changed.

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Paola Bertucci, "In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How a journey through Italy casts light on secrets, stereotypes, and the manipulation of information in eighteenth-century science.

In 1749, the celebrated French physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet set out on a journey through Italy to solve an international controversy over the medical uses of electricity. At the end of his nine-month tour, he published a highly influential account of his philosophical battle with his Italian counterparts, discrediting them as misguided devotees of the marvelous. Paola Bertucci's In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023) brilliantly reveals the mysteries of Nollet's journey, uncovering a subterranean world of secretive and ambitious intelligence gathering masked as scientific inquiry.

The advent of electricity was a pivotal phenomenon not only in the history of physical experimentation, but also in the cultivation of popular scientific interest. Nollet's journey was supposedly inspired by the need to investigate, and subsequently report on, claims of the use of electrified "medicated tubes" by their Italian inventor Gianfrancesco Pivati. Motivated by economic interests in the silk industry, Nollet's journey was in fact an undercover mission commissioned by the French state to discover the secrets of Italian silk manufacture and possibly supplant its international success. The event that sparked the medical controversy—the unusual cure of a bishop—was a complete fabrication.

Bertucci insightfully contrasts published accounts of the event with private documents and discusses how eighteenth-century scientists published fictional events and results to bolster their careers, ultimately leading to long-lasting misrepresentations of scientific practice and enduring stereotypes. In the Land of Marvels reveals the constellation of historical actors, from reputed physicists to travel writers and electrical amateurs, who manipulated information to gain authority and prestige.

Paola Bertucci (NEW HAVEN, CT) is a professor in the department of history at Yale University. She is the author of the award-winning Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France.

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J. C. D. Clark, "The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Enlightenment studies are currently in a state of flux, with unresolved arguments among its adherents about its dates, its locations, and the contents of the 'movement'. This book cuts the Gordian knot. There are many books claiming to explain the Enlightenment, but most assume that it was a thing. J. C. D. Clark shows what it actually was, namely a historiographical concept. Currently 'the Enlightenment' is a term widely accepted across popular culture and in a variety of academic disciplines, notably history, philosophy, political theory, political science, literary studies, and theology; Clark calls for a fundamental reconsideration in each.

The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History (Oxford UP, 2024) provides a critical historical analysis of the Enlightenment in England, Scotland, France, Germany, and the United States from c. 1650 to the present. It argues that the degree of commonality between social and intellectual movements in each--and, more broadly, between the five societies--has been overstated for polemical purposes. Clark shows that the concept of 'the Enlightenment' was not widely adopted in those societies until the mid-twentieth century; indeed, that it was unknown in the eighteenth. Without the concept, people at the time were unable to act in ways that would have created the Enlightenment as a coherent movement. Since the conventional account has held that the Enlightenment was a phenomenon, the idea could be used as a component of what has been called a 'civil religion': a summing up of the myths of origin, aims, and essential values of a society from which dissent is not permitted. An appreciation that it was instead a historiographical concept undermines, in turn, the idea that there was any great transition to what came to be called 'modernity'.

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Michael Livingston, "Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Agincourt is one of the most famous battles in English history, a defining part of the national myth. This groundbreaking study by Michael Livingston presents a new interpretation of Henry V's great victory.

King Henry V's victory over the French armies at Agincourt on 25 October 1415 is unquestionably one of the most famous battles in history. From Shakespeare's “band of brothers” speech to its appearances in numerous films, Agincourt rightfully has a place among a handful of conflicts whose names are immediately recognized around the world.

The English invasion of France in 1415 saw them take the French port of Harfleur after a long siege, following which Henry was left with a sick and weakened army, which he chose to march across Normandy to the port of Calais against the wishes of his senior commanders. The French had assembled a superior force and shadowed the English Army before finally blocking its route. The battle that followed was an overwhelming victory for the English, with the French suffering horrific casualties. Agincourt opened the door for Henry V's further conquests in France.

Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King (Bloomsbury, 2023) provides a new look at this famous battle. Livingston goes back to the original sources, including the French battle plan that still survives today, to give a new interpretation, one that challenges the traditional site of the battlefield itself. It is a thrilling new history that not only rewrites the battle as we know it, but also provides fresh insights into the men who fought and died there.

An acclaimed conflict analyst, Michael Livingston has twice won the Distinguished Book Prize from the international Society for Military History (2017, 2020) and is the author of numerous popular history books, including Never Greater Slaughter and Crécy: Battle of Five Kings. He serves as Distinguished Professor at The Citadel.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. You can also find his writing about books and films on Pages and Frames.

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Isaac Nakhimovsky, "The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Holy Alliance is now most familiar as a label for conspiratorial reaction. In The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Isaac Nakhimovsky reveals the Enlightenment origins of this post-Napoleonic initiative, explaining why it was embraced at first by many contemporary liberals as the birth of a federal Europe and the dawning of a peaceful and prosperous age of global progress. Examining how the Holy Alliance could figure as both an idea of progress and an emblem of reaction, Dr. Nakhimovsky offers a novel vantage point on the history of federative alternatives to the nation state. The result is a clearer understanding of the recurring appeal of such alternatives—and the reasons why the politics of federation has also come to be associated with entrenched resistance to liberalism’s emancipatory aims.

Dr. Nakhimovsky connects the history of the Holy Alliance with the better-known transatlantic history of eighteenth-century constitutionalism and nineteenth-century efforts to abolish slavery and war. He also shows how the Holy Alliance was integrated into a variety of liberal narratives of progress. From the League of Nations to the Cold War, historical analogies to the Holy Alliance continued to be drawn throughout the twentieth century, and Nakhimovsky maps how some of the fundamental political problems raised by the Holy Alliance have continued to reappear in new forms under new circumstances. Time will tell whether current assessments of contemporary federal systems seem less implausible to future generations than initial liberal expectations of the Holy Alliance do to us today.

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Morgane Cadieu, "On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

An analysis of social mobility in contemporary French literature that offers a new perspective on figures who move between social classes.

Social climbers have often been the core characters of novels. Their position between traditional tiers in society makes them touchstones for any political and literary moment, including our own. Morgane Cadieu's study looks at a certain kind of social climber in contemporary French literature whom she calls the parvenant. Taken from the French term parvenu, which refers to one who is newly arrived, a parvenant is a character who shuttles between social groups. A parvenant may become part of a new social class but devises literary ways to come back, constantly undoing any fixed idea of social affiliation.

Focusing on recent French novels and autobiographies, On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature (U Chicago Press, 2024) speaks powerfully to issues of emancipation and class. Cadieu offers a fresh critical look at tales of social mobility in the work of Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye, among others, shedding fascinating light on upward mobility today as a formal, literary problem.

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Terrence G. Peterson, "Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Algerian War of Independence constituted a major turning point of 20th century history. The conflict exacerbated divisions in French society, culminating in an unsuccessful coup attempt by the OAS in 1961. The war also launched the Third Worldist movement, delegitimized colonial rule because of its brutality, and it gave us one of the towering anti-colonial intellectual figures, the pro-FLN Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon.

Today’s episode focuses on another important development that occurred as a result of the Algerian War: the transformation of modern warfare. Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency (Cornell UP, 2024) shows how French generals, officers, and civil officials sought to counter Algerian independence with their own project of social transformation. My guest, Terrence Peterson, argues that the French military effort in Algeria never exclusively focused on repression. Instead, military leaders fashioned new forms of surveillance and social control that its proponents hoped would capture the loyalty of Algerians and transform Algerian society. Although ultimately unsuccessful in its attempt to ‘keep Algeria French,’ the new strategy of counterinsurgency became a model for anti-communist military and intelligence officers around the world.

Terrence Peterson is an Associate Professor of History at Florida International University, where he teaches on modern Europe and European empires. He holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

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Sara E. Johnson, "Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World" (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2023)

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry is bound to appear. As a lawyer, philosophe, and Enlightenment polymath, Moreau created and compiled an immense archive that remains a vital window into the social, political, and intellectual fault lines of the Age of Revolutions. But the gilded spines and elegant designs that decorate his archive obscure the truth: Moreau's achievements were predicated upon the work of enslaved people and free people of color. Their labor afforded him the leisure to research, think, and write. Their rich intellectual and linguistic cultures filled the pages of his most applauded works. Every beautiful book Moreau produced contains an embedded story of hidden violence.

In Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2023), Sara Johnson's arresting investigation of race and knowledge in the revolutionary Atlantic surrounds Moreau with the African-descended people he worked so hard to erase, immersing him in a vibrant community of language innovators, forgers of kinship networks, and world travelers who strove to create their own social and political lives. Built from archival fragments, creative speculation, and audacious intellectual courage, Encyclopédie noire is a communal biography of the women and men who made Moreau’s world.

Sara E. Johnson is professor of literature of the Americas at University of California, San Diego.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Magdalena J. Zaborowska, "Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France" (Duke UP, 2018)

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971–87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed “Chez Baldwin.” In Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France (Duke UP, 2018), Magdalena J. Zaborowska employs Baldwin’s home space as a lens through which to expand his biography and explore the politics and poetics of blackness, queerness, and domesticity in his complex and underappreciated later works. Zaborowska shows how the themes of dwelling and black queer male sexuality in The Welcome Table, Just above My Head, and If Beale Street Could Talk directly stem from Chez Baldwin's influence on the writer. The house was partially torn down in 2014. Accessible, heavily illustrated, and drawing on interviews with Baldwin's friends and lovers, unpublished letters, and manuscripts, Me and My House offers new insights into Baldwin's life, writing, and relationships, making it essential reading for all students, scholars, and fans of Baldwin.

Magdalena J. Zaborowska is Professor of Afroamerican and American Studies and the John Rich Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan

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Colette Brull-Ulmann et al., "Through the Morgue Door: One Woman’s Story of Survival and Saving Children in German-Occupied Paris" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Anne Landau and Margaret Sinclair, the translators of Through the Morgue Door: One Woman’s Story of Survival and Saving Children in German-Occupied Paris (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

n 1934, at the age of fourteen, Colette Brull-Ulmann knew that she wanted to become a pediatrician. By the age of twenty-one, she was in her second year of studying medicine. By 1942, Brull-Ulman and her family had become registered Jews under the ever-increasing statutes against them enacted by Petain's government. Her father had been arrested and interned at the Drancy detention camp and Brull-Ulman had become an intern at the Rothschild Hospital, the only hospital in Paris where Jewish physicians were allowed to practice and Jewish patients could go for treatment.

Under Claire Heyman, a charismatic social worker who was a leader of the hospital's secret escape network, Brull-Ulmann began working tirelessly to rescue Jewish children treated at the Rothschild. Her devotion to the protection of children, her bravery, and her imperviousness in the face of the deadly injustices of the Holocaust were always evident--whether smuggling children to safety through the Paris streets in the dead of night or defying officers and doctors who frighteningly held her fate in their hands. Ultimately, Brull-Ulmann was forced to flee the Rothschild in 1943, when she joined her father's resistance network, gathering and delivering information for De Gaulle's secret intelligence agency until the Liberation in 1945.

In 1970, Brull-Ulmann finally became a licensed pediatrician. But after the war, like so many others, she sought to bury her memories. It wasn't until decades later when she finally started to speak publicly--not only about her own work and survival, but about the one child who affected her most deeply. Originally published in French in 2017, Brull-Ulmann's memoir fearlessly illustrates the horrors of Jewish life under the German Occupation and casts light on the heretofore unknown story of the Rothschild Hospital during this period. But most of all, it chronicles the life of a truly exceptional and courageous woman for whom not acting was never an option.

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Ellen Hampton, "Doctors at War: The Clandestine Battle Against the Nazi Occupation of France" (LSU Press, 2023)

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Ellen Hampton's Doctors at War: The Clandestine Battle Against the Nazi Occupation of France (LSU Press, 2023) tells the stories of physicians in France working to impede the German war effort and undermine French collaborators during the Occupation from 1940 to 1945. Determined to defeat the Third Reich's incursion, one group of prominent Paris doctors founded a medical network to treat injured Resistance fighters who they then secretly transported to Allied countries to avoid forced labor in Germany. Another team of medics organized a cabal focused on intelligence gathering and sabotage that became one of the largest in wartime France, even after the Gestapo arrested and imprisoned its leaders. Deported to concentration camps, these physicians continued to frustrate Nazi efforts by rendering aid and keeping their fellow prisoners alive. Others joined rural guerrilla camps to care for the young conscripts fighting to block German reinforcements from reaching Normandy after the D-Day landing.

These stories, assembled here for the first time, add a crucial dimension to the history of Occupied France. Written for both historians and general readers of World War II history, Doctors at War stands as a dramatic, character-driven account of physicians' courage and resilience in the face of evil. It serves as a window into life under a fascist regime and the travails of doctors who negotiated the terrifying moral labyrinth that was the German military's occupation of France.

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Michelle Tusan, "The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023), Michelle Tusan profoundly reshapes the story of how the First World War ended in the Middle East. Tracing Europe's war with the Ottoman Empire through to the signing of Lausanne, which finally ended the war in 1923, she places the decisive Allied victory over Germany in 1918 in sharp relief against the unrelenting war in the East and reassesses the military operations, humanitarian activities and diplomatic dealings that continued after the signing of Versailles in 1919.

She shows how, on the Middle Eastern Front, Britain and France directed Allied war strategy against a resurgent Ottoman Empire to sustain an imperial system that favored Europe's dominance within the nascent international system. The protracted nature of the conflict and ongoing humanitarian crisis proved devastating for the civilian populations caught in its wake and increasingly questioned old certainties about a European-led imperial order and humanitarian intervention. Its consequences would transform the postwar world.

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Laurien Vastenhout, "Between Community and Collaboration: 'Jewish Councils' in Western Europe under Nazi Occupation" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The first comprehensive, comparative study of the 'Jewish Councils' in the Netherlands, Belgium and France during Nazi rule. In the postwar period, there was extensive focus on these organisations' controversial role as facilitators of the Holocaust. They were seen as instruments of Nazi oppression, aiding the process of isolating and deporting the Jews they were ostensibly representing. As a result, they have chiefly been remembered as forms of collaboration.

Using a wide range of sources including personal testimonies, diaries, administrative documents and trial records, Laurien Vastenhout demonstrates that the nature of the Nazi regime, and its outlook on these bodies, was far more complex. She sets the conduct of the Councils' leaders in their prewar and wartime social and situational contexts and provides a thorough understanding of their personal contacts with the Germans and clandestine organisations. Between Community and Collaboration: 'Jewish Councils' in Western Europe under Nazi Occupation (Cambridge UP, 2022) reveals what German intentions with these organisations were during the course of the occupation, and allows for a deeper understanding of the different ways in which the Holocaust unfolded in each of these countries.

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Christopher Beckman, "Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine" (Hurst, 2024)

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine (Hurst, 2024) by Christopher Beckman takes readers on a tantalising voyage through European and American gastronomic history, following the trail of a small but mighty fish: the anchovy.

Whether in ubiquitous Roman garum, mass-produced British condiments, elaborate French haute cuisine or modern Spanish tapas, anchovies have been enhancing the flavour of many dishes for thousands of years. Yet, depending upon the time and place—and who was eating them—they have also been disdained as worthless little fish, deemed too small, bony and inconsequential for popular or elite consumption. From Western Europe to the USA, Beckman shows how the evolving and ambiguous position of anchovies provides surprising insights into the relationship between food, class and status throughout history.

Drawing on cookbooks, literature and art, this is the hidden story of the diminutive anchovy, and its outsized role in shaping the West’s cuisine.

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Joachim C. Häberlen, "Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe" (Penguin, 2023)

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In post-war Europe, protest was everywhere. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, from Paris to Prague, Milan to Wroclaw, ordinary people took to the streets, fighting for a better world. Their efforts came to a head most dramatically in 1968 and 1989, when mass movements swept Europe and rewrote its history.

In the decades between, Joachim C. Haberlen argues in Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe (Penguin, 2023), new movements emerged that transformed the nature of protesting. Activism moved beyond traditional demonstrations, from squatting to staging 'happenings' and camping out at nuclear power plants. People protested in the way they dressed, the music they listened to, the lovers they slept with, the clubs where they danced all night. New movements were born, notably anti-racism, women's liberation, gay liberation and environmentalism. And protest turned inward, as activists experimented with new ways of living and feeling, from communes to group therapy, in their efforts to live a better life in the here and now.

Some of these struggles succeeded, others failed. But successful or not, their history provides a glimpse into roads not taken, into futures that did not happen. The stories in Haberlen's book invite us to imagine different futures; to struggle, to fail, and to try again. In a time when we are told that there are no alternatives, they show us that there could be another way.

Joachim C. Häberlen is a historian of modern Europe. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and worked until 2022 at the University of Warwick; he now lives and works in Berlin.

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Lesley Smith, "Fragments of a World: William of Auvergne and His Medieval Life" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Lesley Smith of Oxford University joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Fragments of a World: William of Auvergne and His Medieval Life (University of Chicago Press, 2023). It has been 140 years since a full biography of William of Auvergne (1180?-1249), which may come as a surprise, given that William was an important gateway of Greek and Arabic thought and philosophy to western Europe in the thirteenth century, and one of the earliest writers in the medieval Latin west on demonology. Lesley Smith's aims in this book are two-fold: first, to take a closer look at William, the human being, how he saw the world and his place in it; and to uncover William's interactions with his Parisian congregation through the nearly 600 sermons he left after his death.

Smith has mined these writings, unremarked in previous scholarship, to give us a different perspective on the schoolmaster, bishop of Paris, and strict theologian we have come to know: a preacher who spoke and ministered not just to the powerful and elite, but also to commoners, to the poor, and to the less fortunate. Through a study of the sermons, Smith creates a broader landscape of William's thought and life, highlighting his attention to the importance--and limits--of language, and his attempts to find a way to address the concerns of the larger populace. In his preaching, we get a sense of the balance William achieved, in the way he communicated religious teachings, in his understanding of the concerns of ordinary Parisians, and in his awareness of the ebb and flow of daily life in a medieval city. The book will interest scholars of intellectual history and philosophy, religion, and literary studies more broadly for Smith's innovative method of excavating the sermons in pursuit of William the person, and his humanity. An altogether "new" William for the twenty-first century.

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Andrew Denning, "Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Andrew Denning uncovers how roads and vehicles began to transform colonial societies across Africa but rarely in the manner Europeans expected. Like seafaring ships and railroads, automobiles and roads were more than a mode of transport—they organised colonial spaces and structured the political, economic, and social relations of empire, both within African colonies and between colonies and the European metropole.

European officials in French, Italian, British, German, Belgian, and Portuguese territories in Africa shared a common challenge—the transport problem. While they imagined that roads would radiate commerce and political hegemony by collapsing space, the pressures of constructing and maintaining roads rendered colonial administration thin, ineffective, and capricious. Automotive empire emerged as the European solution to the transport problem, but revealed weakness as much as it extended power.

As Automotive Empire reveals, motor vehicles and roads seemed the ideal solution to the colonial transport problem. They were cheaper and quicker to construct than railroads, overcame the environmental limitations of rivers, and did not depend on the recruitment and supervision of African porters. At this pivotal moment of African colonialism, when European powers transitioned from claiming territories to administering and exploiting them, automotive empire defined colonial states and societies, along with the brutal and capricious nature of European colonialism itself.

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Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite, "Assassination in Vichy: Marx Dormoy and the Struggle for the Soul of France" (U Toronto Press, 2020)

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

During the night of 25 July 1941, assassins planted a time bomb in the bed of the former French Interior Minister, Marx Dormoy. The explosion on the following morning launched a two-year investigation that traced Dormoy's murder to the highest echelons of the Vichy regime. Dormoy, who had led a 1937 investigation into the "Cagoule," a violent right-wing terrorist organization, was the victim of a captivating revenge plot. Based on the meticulous examination of thousands of documents, Assassination in Vichy: Marx Dormoy and the Struggle for the Soul of France (U Toronto Press, 2020) tells the story of Dormoy's murder and the investigation that followed.

At the heart of this book lies a true crime that was sensational in its day. A microhistory that tells a larger and more significant story about the development of far-right political movements, domestic terrorism, and the importance of courage, Assassination in Vichy explores the impact of France's deep political divisions, wartime choices, and post-war memory.

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Karine Varley, "Vichy's Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Karine Varley's book Vichy's Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War (Cambridge UP, 2023) advances a significant new interpretation of French collaboration during the Second World War. Arguing that the path to collaboration involved not merely Nazi Germany but Fascist Italy, it suggests that the Vichy French government was caught in a double bind. On the one hand, many of the threats to France's territory, colonial empire and power came from Rome as well as Berlin. On the other, Vichy was caught between the irreconcilable yet inescapable positions of the two Axis governments. Unable to resolve the conflict, Vichy sought to play the two Axis powers against each other.

By exploring French dealings with Italy at diplomatic, military and local levels in France and its colonial empire, Double Bind reveals the multi-dimensional and multi-directional nature of Vichy's policy. It therefore challenges many enduring conceptions of collaboration with reference to Franco-German relations and offers a fresh perspective on debates about Vichy France and collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

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Miranda Sachs, "An Age to Work: Working-Class Childhood in Third Republic Paris" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Childhood as lived during the French Third Republic was very different from childhood during the modern era. Working-class children laboured alongside adults in the home, on the streets, and in places of work. French authorities sought to change this and redefine childhood by means of government organizations, separate legal structures, and schools for delinquent children. French authorities visited places of work, schools, and interviewed parents. Yet gender based divisions between males and females were still reinforced.

Professor Sachs was an assistant professor of history at Texas State University and will start as assistant professor with Texas A & M next year. In her latest publication, An Age to Work: Working Class Childhood in Third Republic Paris (Oxford University Press, 2023), Professor Sachs uses police reports, records of interviews, and postcards to explore the history of working class children in Paris. Dr. Sachs received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2017. Prior to coming to Texas State, she taught at William & Mary and Denison University.

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Michael Sonenscher, "Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What exactly is capitalism? How has the meaning of capitalism changed over time? And what’s at stake in our understanding or misunderstanding of it? In Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word (Princeton UP, 2022), Michael Sonenscher examines the history behind the concept and pieces together the range of subjects bound up with the word. Sonenscher shows that many of our received ideas fail to pick up the work that the idea of capitalism is doing for us, without us even realizing it.

“Capitalism” was first coined in France in the early nineteenth century. It began as a fusion of two distinct sets of ideas. The first involved thinking about public debt and war finance. The second involved thinking about the division of labour. Sonenscher shows that thinking about the first has changed radically over time. Funding welfare has been added to funding warfare, bringing many new questions in its wake. Thinking about the second set of ideas has offered far less room for manoeuvre. The division of labour is still the division of labour and the debates and discussions that it once generated have now been largely forgotten. By exploring what lay behind the earlier distinction before it collapsed and was eroded by the passage of time, Sonenscher shows why the present range of received ideas limits our political options and the types of reform we might wish for.

Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge. His books include Sans-Culottes and Before the Deluge (both Princeton UP).

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The (ir)Rational Mob: On the Life and Legacy of Gustave Le Bon

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Every protest movement has been dismissed as a mere ‘mindless mob,’ caught in a psychological frenzy. Where did this idea come from, and why does it last? Gustave Le Bon.

This is episode one of Cited’s returning season, The Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. You can also hear a trailer of next week’s episode, the (ir)Rational Rainbow, on their website.

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Elisa Camiscioli, "Selling French Sex: Prostitution, Trafficking, and Global Migrations" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Selling French Sex: Prostitution, Trafficking, and Global Migrations (Cambridge UP, 2024) is an illuminating account of the cultural, social, and economic history of the sale of 'French sex'. It explores the discourses and experiences surrounding the early twentieth century debate on sex trafficking, which mobilized various international reform movements to combat the coerced prostitution of young women abroad. According to popular legend and empirical studies, French women were present in brothels all over the world, where they were the most desired and best paid in the business. But were they trafficking victims or willing migrants? In this timely book, Elisa Camiscioli reconstructs the networks and mechanisms of cross-border migrations for sexual labor; elucidates women's motives for leaving and staying; and explains why French migrant sexual labor occupied such a prominent place in the underworld of prostitution, as well as in the imaginaries of anti-trafficking campaigners, immigration officials, and ordinary consumers of vice.

Elisa Camiscioli is a professor of history at Binghamton University. She specializes in immigration to and from France, sex trafficking, and race and sexual politics in modern France and its empire. She completed a B.A., cum laude, at University of Pennsylvania and earned a M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. In addition to a number of peer-reviewed articles, she is the author of Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (Duke University Press. 2009). Dr. Camiscioli was co-editor of the Journal of Women's History from 2015 to 2020.

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Polo B. Moji, "Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives" (Routledge, 2022)

Fri, 31 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Polo B. Moji's book Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (Routledge, 2022) approaches the study of AfroEurope through narrative forms produced in contemporary France, a location which richly illustrates race in European spaces.

Moji adopts a transdisciplinary lens that combines critical black and urban geographies, intersectional feminism, and textual analysis to explore the spatial negotiations of black women in France. It assesses literature, film, and music as narrative forms and engages with the sociocultural and political contexts from which they emerge. Through the figure of the black flâneuse and the analytical framework of "walking as method", the book goes beneath spectacular representations of ghettoised banlieues, televised protests, and shipwrecked migrants to analyse the spatiality of blackness in the everyday. It argues that the material-discursive framing of black flânerie, as both relational and embodied movements, renders visible a politics of place embedded in everyday micro-struggles of raced-sexed subjects.

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Adam Zientek, "A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)

Fri, 24 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Adam Zientek, Assistant Professor of History at UC Davis joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024). Beginning in the fall of 1914, every French soldier on the Western Front received a daily ration of wine from the army. At first it was a modest quarter litre, but by 1917 it had increased to the equivalent of a full bottle each day. The wine ration was intended to sustain morale in the trenches, making the men more willing to endure suffering and boredom. The army also supplied soldiers with doses of distilled alcohol just before attacks to increase their ferocity and fearlessness. This strategic distribution of alcohol was a defining feature of French soldiers’ experiences of the war and amounted to an experimental policy of intoxicating soldiers for military ends.

A Thirst for Wine and War explores the French army’s emotional and behavioral conditioning of soldiers through the distribution of a mind-altering drug that was later hailed as one of the army’s “fathers of victory.” The daily wine ration arose from an unexpected set of factors including the demoralization of trench warfare, the wine industry’s fear of losing its main consumers, and medical consensus about the benefits of wine drinking. The army’s related practice of distributing distilled alcohol to embolden soldiers was a double-edged sword, as the men might become unruly. The army implemented regulations and surveillance networks to curb men’s drinking behind the lines, in an attempt to ensure they only drank when it was useful to the war effort. When morale collapsed in spring 1917, the army lost control of this precarious system as drunken soldiers mutinied in the thousands. Discipline was restored only when the army regained command of soldiers’ alcohol consumption.

Drawing on a range of archives, personal narratives, and trench journals, A Thirst for Wine and War shows how the French army’s intoxication of its soldiers constituted a unique exercise of biopower deployed on a mass scale.

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Nicholas Underwood, "Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France" (Indiana UP, 2022)

Tue, 21 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Nick Underwood's Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar Paris (Indiana University Press, 2022) is a captivating study of the culture and politics of the vibrant community of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Making their way to the French capital from various sites in Eastern Europe, members of this Jewish community developed their own cultural institutions, including theatre companies, musical groups, and choruses. Left-leaning in their politics, these newly French Jews typically understood their cultural and community work as expressions of a Socialist or Communist politics. This political orientation also drew non-Yiddish-speaking and non-Jewish audiences to the work of these organizations and artists, establishing forms of solidarity across cultural and religious groups and classes, in Yiddish and in French.

Throughout the book, Underwood examines closely the history of key cultural organizations that brought Yiddish speakers in Paris together and worked to disseminate Yiddish language and culture throughout a wider community in France. Understanding their efforts as profoundly modern, even avant-garde, these cultural and political actors forged and expressed a Jewish diaspora nationalism they regarded as compatible with French republicanism. France was a space of multicultural possibility that seemed the perfect place to build the future.

Taking the reader through the work of various figures and groups, Underwood follows the solidarity, performances, and pluralism of the Yiddish community in interwar Paris up to the eve of the Second World War. Attentive to the devastating experiences that awaited so many French and European Jews after 1939, the book remains focused on the present of the interwar period throughout, emphasizing the community's hopes for an inclusive French society respectful of forms of religious, racial, cultural, and linguistic difference.

Drawing on a wealth of archival materials the author pursued in sites in multiple countries, the book includes some very real and moving stories. Apart from the historical actors Underwood sought out directly and through family members, the lives and experiences of so many actors, singers, musicians, and engaged community members spring off many of the book's pages. It's a compelling book that will be of great interest to scholars across subfields and disciplines, and I hope you enjoy our conversation.

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Alexandra Paulin-Booth, "Time and Radical Politics in France: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War" (Manchester UP, 2023)

Sun, 19 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

People experience and comprehend time in different fashions in response to events occurring around them. The experience of time and the speed at which change is perceived to occur may alter during eras of crisis. Time can feel compressed for some and broad or flat for others. These comprehensions of time in turn give form to political views and provide impetus for actions in the political sphere. Political reforms may seem to fast and without foundation for some and not nearly fast enough for those desperately seeking change. Using French thinkers and activists of the radical left and right between the Dreyfus Affair and the First World War as a case study, Dr. Alexandra Paulin-Booth argues that time provides an important means of exploring how concepts such as nationalism, revolution, and social change were understood at the turn of the century.

In her latest work, Time and Radical Politics in France: from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (Manchester University Press, 2023) Dr. Paulin-Booth argues French political and intellectual figures differed in opinion as to whether a glorious future was within their grasp or perhaps the past promised salvation for the embattled French Third Republic.

Professor Alexandra Paulin-Booth is a Postdoctoral Researcher & Academic Coordinator with Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. Dr. Paulin-Booth completed her Masters degrees at Durham University before studying for Ph.D. in History at the University of Oxford. She has also taught at Balliol College, Oxford and Durham University.

Rick Northrop is an undergraduate student of History in Calgary, Alberta.

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Karen Sullivan, "Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 14 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Karen Sullivan of Bard College talks to Jana Byars about her recent book, Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen (U Chicago Press, 2023). A reparative reading of stories about medieval queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Much of what we know about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and then Queen of England, we know from recorded rumor--gossip often qualified by the curious phrase "It was said" or the love songs, ballads, and romances that gossip inspired.

While we can mine these stories for evidence about the historical Eleanor, Karen Sullivan invites us to consider, instead, what even the most fantastical of these tales reveal about this queen and about life as a twelfth-century noblewoman. This book paints a fresh portrait of a singular medieval queen and the women who shared her world. The conversation gets into the idea of how we know what we know, and what we can possibly know about a woman this famous.

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Francesca Trivellato, "The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Sun, 05 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange had been invented by Jews. In The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), Francesca Trivellato draws upon the economic, cultural, intellectual, and business history of the period to trace the origin of this myth and what its usage in early modern Europe reveals about contemporary views of both commerce and Judaism. Trivellato begins by explaining the development of bills of exchange in the Middle Ages as a means of transferring funds across long distances, ones which helped the expansion of international trade. Though used by both Christians and Jews, concerns about crypto-Judaism among converted Christians in the town of Bordeaux where Cleirac lived may have been key to his belief in their association with the bills. From Cheirac’s book the myth then spread throughout much of western and central Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, where it was used both to support anti-Semitic views and as examples by philo-Semitic writers such as Montesquieu of the superior commercial ability of Jews.

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Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac, "The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Fri, 03 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In many countries, property law grants equal rights to men and women. Why, then, do women still accumulate less wealth than men? Combining quantitative, ethnographic, and archival research, The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality (Harvard UP, 2023) explains how and why, in every class of society, women are economically disadvantaged with respect to their husbands, fathers, and brothers. The reasons lie with the unfair economic arrangements that play out in divorce proceedings, estate planning, and other crucial situations where law and family life intersect.

Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac argue that, whatever the law intends, too many outcomes are imprinted with unthought sexism. In private decisions, old habits die hard: families continue to allocate resources disproportionately to benefit boys and men. Meanwhile, the legal profession remains in thrall to assumptions that reinforce gender inequality. Bessière and Gollac marshal a range of economic data documenting these biases. They also examine scores of family histories and interview family members, lawyers, and notaries to identify the accounting tricks that tip the scales in favor of men.

Women across the class spectrum—from poor single mothers to MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos—can face systematic economic disadvantages in divorce cases. The same is true in matters of inheritance and succession in family-owned businesses. Moreover, these disadvantages perpetuate broader social disparities beyond gender inequality. As Bessière and Gollac make clear, the appropriation of capital by men has helped to secure the rigid hierarchies of contemporary class society itself.

Céline Bessière is Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris-Dauphine.

Sibylle Gollac is a researcher in sociology at the National Centre for Scientific Research.

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Éric Fassin, "State Anti-Intellectualism and the Politics of Gender and Race: Illiberal France and Beyond" (CEU Press, 2024)

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Éric Fassin (Université Paris 8) to discuss his new book with CEU Press entitled, State Anti-Intellectualism and the Politics of Gender and Race: Illiberal France and Beyond (2024).

Éric Fassin examines the trend of state anti-intellectualism in France using the nation as a case study to demonstrate that this tendency is not limited to ostensibly illiberal regimes. He argues that today’s world requires an examination of this phenomenon beyond Cold War geopolitical divisions and highlights a global shift towards authoritarian neoliberalism. His book is a plea for the political urgency of intellectual work in a global moment of political anti-intellectualism.

Éric’s book is part of our new series, CEU Press Perspectives. The series offers the latest viewpoints on both new and perennial issues, these books address a wide range of topics of critical importance today. The new series, originating from an international collection of leading authors, encourages us to look at issues from a different viewpoint, to think outside the box, and to stimulate debate.

You can learn more about the series here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more here.

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

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Alexander Statman, "A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Alexander Statman's book A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science.

The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes praised Chinese philosophy as an enduring model of reason. Later philosophes rejected it as stuck in the past. Seeking to vindicate ancient knowledge, a group of French statesmen and savants began a conversation with the last great scholar of the Jesuit mission to China. Together, they drew from Chinese learning to challenge the emerging concept of Western advancement.

A Global Enlightenment traces this overlooked exchange between China and the West to make compelling claims about the history of progress, notions of European exceptionalism, and European engagement with Chinese science. To tell this story, Alexander Statman focuses on a group of thinkers he terms “orphans of the Enlightenment,” intellectuals who embraced many of their contemporaries’ ideals but valued ancient wisdom. They studied astronomical records, gas balloons, electrical machines, yin-yang cosmology, animal magnetism, and Daoist medicine. And their inquiries helped establish a new approach to the global history of science.

Rich with new archival research and fascinating anecdotes, A Global Enlightenment deconstructs two common assumptions about the early to late modern period. Though historians have held that the idea of a mysterious and inscrutable East was inherent in Enlightenment progress theory, Statman argues that it was the orphans of the Enlightenment who put it there: by identifying China as a source of ancient wisdom, they turned it into a foil for scientific development. But while historical consensus supposes that non-Western ideas were banished from European thought over the course of the Enlightenment, Statman finds that Europeans became more interested in Chinese science—as a precursor, then as an antithesis, and finally as an alternative to modernity.

Alexander Statman is a Distinguished Scholar and JD candidate at the UCLA School of Law and a former A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Jeremy Black, "Paris: A Short History" (Thames & Hudson, 2024)

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Once described as "that metropolis of dress and debauchery" by the Scottish poet David Mallet, Paris has always had a reputation for a peculiar joie de vivre, from art to architecture, cookery to couture, captivating minds and imaginations across the Continent and beyond. In Paris: A Short History, historian Jeremy Black examines the unique cultural circumstances that made Paris the vibrant capital it is today.

Black explores how Paris has been shaped throughout time, starting in the first century BCE, when the city was founded by the Parisii. From a small Gallic capital conquered by the Romans, Paris transformed into a flourishing medieval city full of spectacular palaces and cathedrals, including Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame de Paris. During the illustrious reigns of Louis XIV and XV, Paris became one of the most beautiful and cosmopolitan capitals in the world, before the Revolution tore French society apart, changing the city forever. The Belle Époque brought new ideas and architecture to the city, including the iconic Eiffel Tower, before the destruction of World War I and II launched a massive regeneration project. Black completes his history by exploring present-day Paris and its role as the seat of a leading power on the world stage, and its future as the host of the 2024 Olympic Games.

Paris: A Short History (Thames & Hudson, 2024) deftly demonstrates that the history of Paris is about more than just a city: it is the history of a culture, a society, and a state that has impacted the rest of the world through centuries of changing fortunes.

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Liz Tregenza, "Wholesale Couture: London and Beyond, 1930-70" (Bloombury, 2023)

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Wholesale Couture: London and Beyond, 1930-70 (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Liz Tregenza seeks to revise the notion that wholesale couturiers were simply copyists and demonstrate the complexities of their design processes and business strategies. This term has fallen out of usage; however, it was used to describe the pinnacle of the British ready-to-wear fashion industry between the 1930s and 1960s. Companies within this sector have typically been recognised as creators of high-quality copies of French haute couture, using ready-to-wear techniques.

Dr. Tregenza traces wholesale couture garments from concept to usage, considering design, manufacture, branding, promotion, retail and export. She looks beyond the garments produced and investigates the people behind these firms, consequently demonstrating the significant role that largely Jewish immigrants played in the development and success of this industry. The book also considers the wider social and economic factors that affected manufacturers and consumers; the effect of austerity, rationing and the Utility scheme, and the pressing need for wholesale couturiers to export their products internationally. It demonstrates that 1946 was a critical year for rebuilding and re-imagining the London fashion industry and that wholesale couturiers were at the centre of these developments. Furthermore, it reveals the impact of changing consumer purchasing power, including the burgeoning youth market, for fashion manufacturers.

Offering a new perspective on British fashion history, Wholesale Couture demonstrates that these couturiers were vital in cementing London's status as a ready-to-wear fashion centre.

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Kerry Wallach, "Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit" (Penn State UP, 2024)

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888-1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But after she was arrested by the French police and then murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, this biography recovers Szalit's life and presents a stunning collection of her art.

Szalit was a sought-after artist. Highly regarded by art historians and critics of her day, she made a name for herself with soulful, sometimes humorous illustrations of Jewish and world literature by Sholem Aleichem, Heinrich Heine, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and others. She published her work in the mainstream German and Jewish press, and she ran in artists' and queer circles in Weimar Berlin and in 1930s Paris. Szalit's fascinating life demonstrates how women artists gained access to Jewish and avant-garde movements by experimenting with different media and genres.

This engaging and deeply moving biography explores the life, work, and cultural contexts of an exceptional Jewish woman artist. Complementing studies such as Michael Brenner's The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit (Penn State UP, 2024) brings Rahel Szalit into the larger conversation about Jewish artists, Expressionism, and modern art.

Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner.

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Tzafrir Barzilay, "Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Between 1348 and 1350, Jews throughout Europe were accused of having caused the spread of the Black Death by poisoning the wells from which the entire population drank. Hundreds if not thousands were executed from Aragon and southern France into the eastern regions of the German-speaking lands. But if the well-poisoning accusations against the Jews during these plague years are the most frequently cited of such cases, they were not unique. The first major wave of accusations came in France and Aragon in 1321, and it was lepers, not Jews, who were the initial targets. Local authorities, and especially municipal councils, promoted these charges so as to be able to seize the property of the leprosaria, Tzafrir Barzilay contends. The allegations eventually expanded to describe an international conspiracy organized by Muslims, and only then, after months of persecution of the lepers, did some nobles of central France implicate the Jews, convincing the king to expel them from the realm.

In Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Barzilay explores the origins of these charges of well poisoning, asks how the fear took root and moved across Europe, which groups it targeted, why it held in certain areas and not others, and why it waned in the fifteenth century. He argues that many of the social, political, and environmental factors that fed the rise of the mass poisoning accusations had already appeared during the thirteenth century, a period of increased urbanization, of criminal poisoning charges, and of the proliferation of medical texts on toxins. In studying the narratives that were presented to convince officials that certain groups committed well poisoning and the legal and bureaucratic mechanisms that moved rumors into officially accepted and prosecutable crimes, Barzilay has written a crucial chapter in the long history of the persecution of European minorities.

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Sarah Horowitz, "The Red Widow: The Scandal That Shook Paris and the Woman Behind It All" (Sourcebooks, 2022)

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Sex. Lies. Murder. Sarah Horowitz's The Red Widow: The Scandal that Shook Paris and the Woman Behind It All (Sourcebooks, 2022) is a book I literally couldn't put down. Drawing on extensive research into the world and life of its "leading lady," Marguerite ("Meg") Steinheil, Horowitz's account is captivating at every turn. With all of the appeal of the best true crime, the book brings historical depth and nuance to a scandalous and salacious narrative of bourgeois life in the French capital. From one compelling chapter to the next, The Red Widow situates Meg's story within the context of a French society in which gender, class, political and public spectacle shaped individual, family, and collective life in complex ways.

In our conversation, Sarah and I discussed how she first stumbled upon Meg's story, the researching and writing of the book (completed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic!), as well as how and why she decided to write a book that would be accessible to a wider readership beyond academia. Part biography, part narrative of sexual and criminal intrigue, part interrogation of the values, expectations, and preoccupations of Belle Epoque culture, the book is both exciting and smart. I dare listeners not to find it all fascinating...

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Marie de Vignerot, Richelieu's Forgotten Advisor and Heiress

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Despite being one of the most influential women of 17th century France, Marie de Vignerot has been largely forgotten. The niece, heiress, and advisor to the infamous Cardinal Richelieu, Marie was deeply motivated by her Catholic faith, yet never re-married after she became a widow at 18. She shaped France and the French empire's political, religious, and cultural life as the unconventional and independent Duchesse d’Aiguillon, a position exceedingly uncommon for a woman to possess in her own right. Bronwen McShea joins Madison's Notes to discuss her book, La Duchesse: The Life of Marie de Vignerot―Cardinal Richelieu's Forgotten Heiress Who Shaped the Fate of France (Pegasus Books, 2023), the first modern biography of Marie de Vignerot, which discusses her life, motivations, and how and why she was written out of history.

Bronwen McShea is a Visiting Assistant Professor in History at the Augustine Institute Graduate School. She earned her B.A. and M.T.S. at Harvard University and her Ph.D. in history at Yale University, and was a 2018-20 James Madison Program Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University. She is also the author of Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France and Women of the Church (What Every Catholic Should Know).

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Oliver Wunsch, "A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France" (Penn State UP, 2024)

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Eighteenth-century France witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of materially unstable art, from oil paintings that cracked within years of their creation to enormous pastel portraits vulnerable to the slightest touch or vibration. In A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Oliver Wunsch traces these artistic practices to the economic and social conditions that enabled them: an ascendant class of art collectors who embraced fragile objects as a means of showcasing their disposable wealth.

While studies of Rococo art have traditionally focused on style and subject matter, this book reveals how the physical construction of paintings and sculptures was central to the period’s reconceptualization of art. Drawing on sources ranging from eighteenth-century artists’ writings to twenty-first-century laboratory analyses, Dr. Wunsch demonstrates how the technical practices of eighteenth-century painters and sculptors provoked a broad transformation in the relationship between art, time, and money. Delicacy, which began the eighteenth century as a commodified extension of courtly sociability, was by century’s end reimagined as the irreducible essence of art’s autonomous value.

Innovative and original, A Delicate Matter is an important intervention in the growing body of scholarship on durability and conservation in eighteenth-century French art. It challenges the art historical tendency to see decay as little more than an impediment to research, instead showing how physical instability played a critical role in establishing art’s meaning and purpose.

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W. B. Allen, "Montesquieu's 'The Spirit of the Laws': A Critical Edition" (Anthem Press, 2023)

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Spirit of the Laws not only systematizes the foundational ideas of “separation of powers” and “balances and checks,” it provides the decisive response to the question of whether power in the nation-state can be limited in the aftermath of the Westphalian settlement of 1648. It describes a civilizational change through which power becomes domesticated, with built-in resistance to attempts to absolutize (or make total) political power. As such, it is the Bible of modern politics, now made more accessible to English readers than it ever has been.

There have been in English only two prior translations of this work that first appeared in 1748. The deficiencies of those two efforts have been broadly identified in the scholarship. Although the text is still used with regularity in university instruction (having been recovered after a lull in the 1950s and 60s), it deserves – and now receives – a presentation that enhances its usefulness in the analysis both of politics and the philosophical foundations of human life.

Montesquieu’s singularity – the first secular argument against race-based slavery and only the second secular argument against the servitude of women – provides a special heritage for the modern word to preserve and a key to making operational those fundamental insights within the context of sustained political and cultural development. The replacement of blood and tribe with the universal attributes of humanity (while recognizing the highly variable ecologies of communities) constitutes the single-most important moral and political development of the modern world. And The Spirit of the Laws bears a primary responsibility for that accomplishment. Montesquieu's 'The Spirit of the Laws': A Critical Edition (Anthem Press, 2024) is a worthy translation.

W. B. Allen studies and writes broadly in political philosophy and history, with special focus on traditions of self-government and liberalism.

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Stefanos Geroulanos, "The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins" (Liveright, 2024)

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory—and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (Liveright, 2024) acclaimed historian Dr. Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world.

The very idea that there was a human past before recorded history only emerged with the Enlightenment, when European thinkers began to reject faith-based notions of humanity and history in favor of supposedly more empirical ideas about the world. From the “state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Dr. Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the ideas that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. Yet as Geroulanos shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Deeming other peoples “savages” allowed for guilt-free violence against them; notions of “killer apes” who were our evolutionary predecessors made war seem natural. The emergence of modern science only accelerated the West’s imperialism. The Nazi obsession with race was rooted in archaeological claims about prehistoric IndoGermans; the idea that colonialized peoples could be “bombed back to the Stone Age” was made possible by the technology of flight and the anthropological idea that civilization advanced in stages.

As Dr. Geroulanos argues, accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than about the deep past—and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started. A necessary, timely, indelible account of how the quest for understanding the origins of humanity became the handmaiden of war and empire, The Invention of Prehistory will forever change how we think about the deep past.

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Aaron Clift, "Anticommunism in French Society and Politics, 1945-1953" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Anticommunism in French Society and Politics, 1945-1953 (Oxford UP, 2023) evaluates the prevalence of anticommunism among the French population in 1945 to 1953, and examines its causes, character, and consequences through a series of case studies on different segments of French society. These include the scouting movement; family organisations; agricultural associations; middle-class groups; and trade unions and other working-class organisations. Aaron Clift contends that anticommunism was more widespread and deeply rooted than previously believed, and had a substantial impact on national politics and on these social groups and organisations.

Furthermore, he argues that the study of anticommunism allows us a deeper understanding of the values they regarded as the most important to defend. Although anticommunism was a diverse phenomenon, this work identifies common discourses, including portrayals of communism as a threat to the nation; the colonial empire; the traditional family; private property; religion; the rural world; and Western civilisation. It also highlights common aims (such as the rehabilitation of wartime collaborators) and tactics (such as the invocation of apoliticism). While acknowledging the importance of the Cold War, it rejects the assumption that anticommunism was an American import or foreign to French society and demonstrates links between anticommunism and anti-Americanism. It concludes that anticommunism drew its strength from the connection or even conflation of communism with perceived negative social changes that were seen to threaten traditional French civilisation, interacting with the postwar international and domestic environment and the personal experiences of individual anticommunists.

Aaron Clift received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2022, following a Master's at the University of Toronto and a Bachelor's at the University of Victoria. After a stint as a Postdoctoral History Scholar at the University of Calgary, Dr. Clift is now a Fellow at the London School of Economics where he teaches and researches on the Cold War period.

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Ada Maria Kuskowski, "Vernacular Law; Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Custom was fundamental to mediaeval legal practice. Whether in a property dispute or a trial for murder, the aggrieved and accused would go to lay court where cases were resolved according to custom. What custom meant, however, went through a radical shift in the mediaeval period. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, custom went from being a largely oral and performed practice to one that was also conceptualised in writing.

In Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Dr. Ada Maria Kuskowski uses French lawbooks known as coutumiers to trace the repercussions this transformation – in the form of custom from unwritten to written and in the language of law from elite Latin to common vernacular – had on the cultural world of law. Vernacular Law offers a new understanding of the formation of a new field of knowledge: authors combined ideas, experience and critical thought to write lawbooks that made disparate customs into the field known as customary law.

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Ali Bhagat, "Governing the Displaced: Race and Ambivalence in Global Capitalism" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Governing the Displaced: Race and Ambivalence in Global Capitalism (Cornell UP, 2024) answers a straightforward question: how are refugees governed under capitalism in this moment of heightened global displacement? To answer this question, Ali Bhagat takes a dual case study approach to explore three dimensions of refugee survival in Paris and Nairobi: shelter, work, and political belonging. Bhagat's book makes sense of a global refugee regime along the contradictory fault lines of passive humanitarianism, violent exclusion, and organized abandonment in the European Union and East Africa. The book highlights the interrelated and overlapping features of refugee governance and survival in these seemingly disparate places. In its intersectional engagement with theories of racial capitalism with respect to right-wing populism, labor politics, and the everyday forms of exclusion, the book is a timely and necessary contribution to the field of migration studies and to political economy.

Ali Bhagat is a PhD in Political Studies (Queen's University) and works largely on the topic of global displacement in relation to racial capitalism. As an international political economist, he is interested in the intersections of race, class, and sexuality and has worked on issues pertaining to LGBTQ+ refugees in particular. His work is based in qualitative methods drawing from interviews, policy analysis, and other ethnographic techniques. Ali’s work cuts across the everyday political economy of housing, work, finance, and political belonging.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu

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Julie Kalman, "The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World During the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

On July 27th, 1827, the dey of Algiers struck the French consul over his country’s refusal to pay back its debts–specifically, to two Jewish merchant families: the Bacris, and the Busnachs. It was an error of judgment: France blockaded Algiers, and later invaded, turning Algeria into a French colony.

The unpaid debt has festered as a diplomatic issue for almost 30 years. Foreign consuls in the corsairing capital of Algiers sent missives back to their superiors complaining about the Bacris and Busnachs and the doggedness they had in pursuing their debts.

Julie Kalman writes about these two families–and their inter-familial business dealing and squabbles–in The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World during the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2023).

In this interview, Julie and I talk about the Bacris and the Busnachs, the strange relationships between Algiers, Britain, France and the U.S., and what “sanctions” and “debt diplomacy” looked like in the early nineteeth century.

Julie Kalman is Associate Professor of history at Monash University. She has published widely on the history of French Jewry in the nineteenth century, and in the post-war period. She is also the author of Orientalizing the Jew: Religion, Culture and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century France (Indiana University Press: 2017), and Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press: 2010).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Kings of Algiers. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Yolanda Ariadne Collins, "Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield" (U California Press, 2024)

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield (U California Press, 2024) questions the effectiveness of market-based policies that govern forests in the interest of mitigating climate change. Yolanda Ariadne Collins interrogates the most ambitious global plan to incentivize people away from deforesting activities: the United Nations-endorsed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative. Forests of Refuge explores REDD+ in Guyana and neighboring Suriname, two highly forested countries in the Amazonian Guiana Shield with low deforestation rates. Yet REDD+ implementation there has been fraught with challenges. Adopting a multisited ethnographic approach, Forests of Refuge takes readers into the halls of policymaking, into conservation development organizations, and into forest-dependent communities most affected by environmental policies and exploitative colonial histories. This book situates these challenges in the inattentiveness of global environmental policies to roughly five hundred years of colonial histories that positioned the forests as places of refuge and resistance. It advocates that the fruits of these oppressive histories be reckoned with through processes of decolonization.

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Angie Chau, "Paris and the Art of Transposition: Early Twentieth Century Sino-French Encounters" (U Michigan Press, 2023)

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

A brief stay in France was, for many Chinese workers and Chinese Communist Party leaders, a vital stepping stone for their careers during the cultural and political push to modernize China after World War I. For the Chinese students who went abroad specifically to study Western art and literature, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris, Paris and the Art of Transposition: Early Twentieth Century Sino-French Encounters (U Michigan Press, 2023) uncovers previously marginalized archives to reveal the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth-century transnational imaginary and to explain why Paris played such a central role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art.

While previous studies of Chinese modernism have focused on how Western modernist aesthetics were adapted or translated to the Chinese context, Angie Chau does the opposite by turning to Paris in the Chinese imaginary and discussing the literary and visual artwork of five artists who moved between France and China: the painter Chang Yu, the poet Li Jinfa, the art critic Fu Lei, the painter Pan Yuliang, and the writer Xu Xu. Chau draws the idea of transposition from music theory where it refers to shifting music from one key or clef to another, or to adapting a song originally composed for one instrument to be played by another. Transposing transposition to the study of art and literature, Chau uses the term to describe a fluid and strategic art practice that depends on the tension between foreign and familiar, new and old, celebrating both novelty and recognition—a process that occurs when a text gets placed into a fresh context.

Angie Chau is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature and Film at the University of Victoria.

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Tom Hamilton, "A Widow's Vengeance After the Wars of Religion: Gender and Justice in Renaissance France" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Paris, 1599. At the end of the French Wars of Religion, the widow Renée Chevalier instigated the prosecution of the military captain Mathurin Delacanche, who had committed multiple acts of rape, homicide, and theft against the villagers who lived around her château near the cathedral city of Sens. But how could Chevalier win her case when King Henri IV's Edict of Nantes ordered that the recent troubles should be forgotten as 'things that had never been'?

A Widow's Vengeance After the Wars of Religion: Gender and Justice in Renaissance France (Oxford UP, 2024) is an original and wide-ranging account of the impact of the religious wars on daily life. Based on neglected archival sources and an exceptional criminal trial, it recovers the experiences of women, peasants, and foot soldiers, who are marginalized in most historical accounts. Tom Hamilton shows how this trial contributed to a wider struggle for justice and an end to violence in postwar France. People throughout the society of the Old Regime did not consider rape and pillage as inevitable consequences of war, and denounced soldiers' illicit violence when they were given the chance. As a result, the early modern laws of war need to be understood not only as the idealistic invention of great legal thinkers, but also as a practical framework that enabled magistrates to do justice for plaintiffs and witnesses, like Chevalier and the villagers who lived under her protection.

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Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, "Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How can territory and peoples be organized? After the dissolution of empires, was the nation-state the only way to unite people politically, culturally, and economically?

In Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia (Princeton UP, 2023), historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine three large-scale, transcontinental projects aimed at bringing together peoples of different regions to mitigate imperial legacies of inequality. Eurasia, Eurafrica, and Afroasia—in theory if not in practice—offered alternative routes out of empire. The theory of Eurasianism was developed after the collapse of imperial Russia by exiled intellectuals alienated by both Western imperialism and communism. Eurafrica began as a design for collaborative European exploitation of Africa but was transformed in the 1940s and 1950s into a project to include France’s African territories in plans for European integration. The Afroasian movement wanted to replace the vertical relationship of colonizer and colonized with a horizontal relationship among former colonial territories that could challenge both the communist and capitalist worlds. Both Eurafrica and Afroasia floundered, victims of old and new vested interests. But Eurasia revived in the 1990s, when Russian intellectuals turned the theory’s attack on Western hegemony into a recipe for the restoration of Russian imperial power. While both the system of purportedly sovereign states and the concentrated might of large economic and political institutions continue to frustrate projects to overcome inequities in welfare and power, Burbank and Cooper‘s study of political imagination explores wide-ranging concepts of social affiliation and obligation that emerged after empire and the reasons for their unlike destinies.

This is Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper second major scholarly collaboration. They previously co-authored Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 2010).

Frederick Cooper is Professor Emeritus of History at New York University. His research has focused on 20th-century Africa, empires, colonization and decolonization, and citizenship. Among his books are Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005); Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (2014); Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State (2014); Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives (2018); and Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (2nd ed., 2019).

Jane Burbank is Professor Emerita, New York University. Her areas of research are Russian political culture, law, and empire. Her works include Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917-1922 (1986); Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917 (2004); Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, edited with David L. Ransel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930, edited with Mark von Hagen and Anatolyi Remnev (2007).

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Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss, "The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV's France" (Getty, 2022)

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Mediterranean maritime art and the forced labour on which it depended were fundamental to the politics and propaganda of France’s King Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715). Yet most studies of French art in this period focus on Paris and Versailles, overlooking the presence or portrayal of galley slaves on the kingdom’s coasts. The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV's France (Getty Research Institute, 2022) by Dr. Gillian Weiss & Dr. Meredith Martin changes that. By examining a wide range of artistic productions—ship design, artillery sculpture, medals, paintings, and prints—Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss uncover a vital aspect of royal representation and unsettle a standard picture of art and power in early modern France.

With an abundant selection of startling images, many never before published, The Sun King at Sea emphasises the role of esclaves turcs (enslaved Turks)—rowers who were captured or purchased from Islamic lands—in building and decorating ships and other art objects that circulated on land and by sea to glorify the Crown. Challenging the notion that human bondage vanished from continental France, this cross-disciplinary volume invites a reassessment of servitude as a visible condition, mode of representation, and symbol of sovereignty during Louis XIV’s reign.

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Alison M. Downham Moore, "The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing (Oxford University Press, 2022), Alison Downham Moore discusses her contribution to the history of women's ageing. Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by French male medical students in the aftermath of the French Revolution, becoming an important pedagogic topic and a common theme of doctors' professional identities in postrevolutionary biomedicine. Older women were identified as an important patient cohort for the expanding medicalisation of French society and were advised to entrust themselves to the hygienic care of doctors in managing the whole era of life from around and after the final cessation of menses. However, menopause owed much of its conceptual weft to earlier themes of women as the sicker sex, of vitalist crisis, of the vapours, and of astrological climacteric years.

This is the first comprehensive study of the origins of the medical concept of menopause, richly contextualising its role in nineteenth-century French medicine and revealing the complex threads of meaning that informed its invention. It tells a complex story of how women's ageing featured in the demographic revolution in modern science, in the denigration of folk medicine, in the unique French field of hygiène, and in the fixation on women in the emergence of modern psychiatry. It reveals the nineteenth-century French origins of the still-current medical and alternative-health approaches to women's ageing as something to be managed through gynaecological surgery, hormonal replacement, and lifestyle intervention.

Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.

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Ridley Scott's "Napoleon": A Historian's Review

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Charles Coutino discusses Ridley Scott's film "Napoleon" with military historian Jeremy Black. Is it accurate? Is it inaccurate? Does it matter? Listen in to the discussion.

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Marcia Stephenson, "Llamas beyond the Andes: Untold Histories of Camelids in the Modern World" (U Texas Press, 2023)

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Camelids are vital to the cultures and economies of the Andes. The animals have also been at the heart of ecological and social catastrophe: Europeans overhunted wild vicuña and guanaco and imposed husbandry and breeding practices that decimated llama and alpaca flocks that had been successfully tended by Indigenous peoples for generations. Yet the colonial encounter with these animals was not limited to the New World. Llamas Beyond the Andes: The Untold History of Camelids in the Modern World (University of Texas Press, 2023) by Dr. Marcia Stephenson tells the five-hundred-year history of animals removed from their native habitats and transported overseas.

Initially Europeans prized camelids for the bezoar stones found in their guts: boluses of ingested matter that were thought to have curative powers. Then the animals themselves were shipped abroad as exotica. As Europeans and US Americans came to recognize the economic value of camelids, new questions emerged: What would these novel sources of protein and fiber mean for the sheep industry? And how best to cultivate herds? Andeans had the expertise, but knowledge sharing was rarely easy. Marcia Stephenson explores the myriad scientific, commercial, and cultural interests that have attended camelids globally, making these animals a critical meeting point for diverse groups from the North and South.

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Lewis Wade, "Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France: Marine Insurance, War and the Atlantic Empire Under Louis XIV" (Boydell Press, 2023)

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France: Marine Insurance, War and the Atlantic Empire Under Louis XIV (Boydell Press, 2023) closely analyses the rise and fall of Louis XIV's marine insurance institutions in Paris, which were central to the French monarchy's efforts to stimulate commerce, colonial enterprise and economic growth. These institutions were the projects of two leading ministers, Jean-Baptiste Colbert and his son, the Marquis de Seignelay. While both men recognised that marine insurance was crucial for protecting commercial investment in French maritime endeavours, Colbert looked to private enterprise to lure capital away from passive investments in state debt towards the marine insurance industry. Seignelay, by contrast, leveraged the tools of privilege on which the French economy was built by creating the first chartered company in the history of marine insurance. In exploring the global insurance portfolios of the men and women who joined these institutions - and the conflicts that arose when maritime incidents came into dispute - the book identifies the absolute monarchy itself as the source of the institutions' struggles. While the markets of Amsterdam and London thrived in the long run, Parisian insurers were made to bear the burden of maritime and colonial losses during Louis XIV's costly wars to make up for the state's inadequate protection of French shipping, the French Atlantic empire and the Parisian market. This encapsulates, the book argues, the overarching system of risk management that lay at the heart of absolutism itself.

This book emerged from Wade´s prize-winning dissertation: "Privilege at a Premium: Insurance, Maritime Law and Political Economy in Early Modern France, 1664-c. 1710" (University of Exeter, 2021).

Lewis Wade is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Leiden University. His doctoral thesis was the recipient of the British Commission for Maritime History’s Boydell & Brewer Prize for the best doctoral thesis in maritime history and the Association of Business Historians’ Coleman Prize for the best doctoral thesis in business history..

This book is available open access here.

Also mentioned in the podcast is:

Harris, R., Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400-1700 (Princeton UP, 2020).

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Judith Surkis, "Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930 (Cornell UP, 2019) traces the intersection of colonialism, law, land expropriation, sex, gender, and family during the century after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Seeking to assimilate Algerian land while differentiating Algerian Muslims from European settlers, colonial authorities developed a system that confined Muslim law to family matters while subjecting Algerian property to French Civil law. Securing and extending French sovereignty over Algeria, this system deprived Algerian Muslims of full citizenship rights while reinforcing French colonial authority.

Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a rigorous and provocative critical "history of the present" that illuminates the persistence of the "Muslim question" in contemporary France. In chapters focused on polygamy, repudiation, and child marriage, the book traces the ways that the French fantasies of the family, including the sexualization of Muslim women and a preoccupation with the sexual "excesses" of Muslim men, found expression in legislation that segregated the legal control of property from the regulation of bodies, beliefs, and personhood. A fascinating genealogy that understands colonial law and the problem of difference within a broader cultural field, the book is an impressive, compelling analysis with striking resonances for a Franco-Algerian present still shaped by the legacies of the colonial past.

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Jennifer Cazenave, "An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah" (SUNY Press, 2019)

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Jennifer Cazenave’s An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (SUNY Press, 2019) is a fascinating analysis of the 220 hours of outtakes edited out of the final nine and a half-hour 1985 film with which listeners and readers might be familiar. Well known around the world as one of the greatest documentary films ever made, and certainly one of the most important works/artifacts of Holocaust history and memory, Lanzmann’s eventual finished film emerged from an astonishing 230 hours of interview footage shot in various locations. Commissioned originally by the State of Israel to make a film about the catastrophe, Lanzmann collected these testimonies over a period of several years before beginning the epic task of editing the film. He saved the outtakes as a vital repository of accounts of those who had lived through the Shoah. The footage has since been acquired, preserved, and digitized as an archive by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The chapters of Cazenave’s book explore the film’s conceptualization and production, reframing the final film in terms of all that it left out, to think about what was included in relationship to those stories and scenes excluded for different reasons. Over years from an initial dissertation project to this volume, Cazenave pursued the story of the film and its outtakes through archival research, detective work, and close technical, aesthetic and theoretical consideration. The resulting analysis takes author and reader from consideration of the film/archive in relationship to Holocaust trials (and especially the Eichmann trial of 1961), to issues of gender and the feminine, to the question of rescue and refugees, as well as debates about representation, witnessing, and testimony. The book is a wonderful and complex study that will be of great interest to readers in Holocaust and cinema studies. The magnum opus of a French filmmaker working with a largely French crew, and produced with funding provided in part by the French government, the film also illuminates, in its own ways (including its silences) the difficult French past and politics of Holocaust history and memory.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.

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Emma Kuby, "Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps After 1945" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Emma Kuby’s new book, Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps After 1945 (Cornell UP, 2019) traces the fascinating history of the International Commission Against the Concentration Camp Regime (CICRC) established in 1949 by the French intellectual and Nazi camp survivor David Rousset. In the wake of the Second World War, Rousset called upon fellow deportees who had been detained for their political activities to serve as expert witnesses to Nazism’s “concentrationary universe” and to oppose any repetition of its crimes in the postwar world.

Following the work of the CICRC through the 1950s and up to the end of the Algerian War, Political Survivors examines the vicissitudes of an organization whose makeup and activities embodied the complexities of the post-1945 political field. Negotiating the traumatic experience and memory of the war, the CICRC’s members and activism were caught up in the politics of the Cold War. This included receiving funding support from the CIA. Attending to sites of political repression and incarceration around the globe, from the Soviet Union’s gulag system to Franco’s Spain, Greece, Tunisia, China, and French Algeria, the international group’s preoccupations also expressed the specificities of French national and imperial politics. The CICRC’s investigations and dramatic mock trials exposed and denounced some injustices, but short-circuited in the face of others. The organization’s insistence on the repeatability of the Nazi camp system was both a source of its power to judge and a weakness. When confronted with situations in which past and present could not be compared so easily, the group’s mission fell short. Plagued by a number of tensions, including a membership policy that refused “racial” victims and did not engage the issue of genocide, the organization ultimately foundered over the case of the Algerian War. Analyzing this complex history, Political Survivors is a book that feels all-too-urgent in 2019. Readers interested in learning more about political violence and resistances past and present will find its insights challenging, and deeply thought-provoking.

To read Emma’s thoughts on the contemporary relevance of the history she treats in Political Survivors, particularly with respect to the detention of migrants in the United States today, see her July 2, 2019 piece in Dissent here.

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Sara Rahnama, "The Future Is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

When Algerians of the 1920s and 30s imagined the future of their country, women’s liberation was foundational to their vision. From the first generation of French-educated schoolteachers, to urban domestic workers who challenged spatial and economic divisions, to nationalist journalists pushing back against French colonial claims, Sara Rahnama describes how a range of Algerian actors conceived of women’s rights and responded to new developments in their own country and across the Middle East.

The Future is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2023) reveals a broad consensus that the advancement of Muslim women was necessary to Algeria’s progress. Rahnama draws on new sources to explain the “ecosystem of intellectual energy devoted to Muslim” that debated girls’ education, women’s employment, voting rights, and women’s and men’s headwear. The book places Algeria in a broader regional conversation, as writers turned to Islamic teachings and history and looked to contemporary changes to women’s political and social opportunities in Egypt, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Palestine to justify needed reforms in Algeria. These discussions in the interwar period sowed seeds that would blossom in the 1950s and 60s as Algerian women joined the nationalist movement, and gained new platforms to contribute their own opinions to these contested issues.

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Colin Jones, "The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The day of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) is universally acknowledged as a major turning-point in the history of the French Revolution. At 12.00 midnight, Maximilien Robespierre, the most prominent member of the Committee of Public Safety which had for more than a year directed the Reign of Terror, was planning to destroy one of the most dangerous plots that the Revolution had faced.

By 12.00 midnight at the close of the day, following a day of uncertainty, surprises, upsets and reverses, his world had been turned upside down. He was an outlaw, on the run, and himself wanted for conspiracy against the Republic. He felt that his whole life and his Revolutionary career were drawing to an end. As indeed they were. He shot himself shortly afterwards. Half-dead, the guillotine finished him off in grisly fashion the next day.

The Fall of Robespierre (Oxford UP, 2021) provides an hour-by-hour analysis of these 24 hours.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Virginia Chieffo Raguin, "The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Time" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Times (Reaktion, 2023) is a unique journey through stained-glass installations that spans both time and place. Diverse in technique and style, these windows speak for the communities that created them. From the twelfth to the twenty-first century, we find in the windows stories of conflict, commemoration, devotion and celebration.

Dr. Virginia Chieffo Raguin is our guide through the cathedrals of Chartres, Canterbury and Cologne, and takes us from Paris’s Sainte-Chapelle to Swiss guildhalls, Iran’s Pink Mosque, Tiffany’s chapel for the World Exposition, Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses and more. As she reveals, the art of stained glass relies on not only a single maker, but the relationship between the physical site, the patron’s aims, the work’s legibility for the spectator and the prevailing style of the era. This is a fascinating and beautifully illustrated volume for anyone interested in stained-glass works.

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Kate Kirkpatrick, "Becoming Beauvoir: A Life" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Kate Kirkpatrick a lecturer in Religion, Philosophy and Culture at King’s College London and author of Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Kirkpatrick has given us a biography that addresses the puzzle and contradictions of the life of the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir drawn from never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how choices shaped her life. Beauvoir, a writer and feminist icon, won prestigious literary prizes and scandalized many with her now classic The Second Sex. She is now celebrated, but during her life she was a controversial figure both by conventional and feminists’ standards. As one who chose to write about lived ideas, both in fiction and essays, rather than build philosophical systems she was easily dismissed as Jean-Paul Sartre’s overly loyal side kick. Kirkpatrick shows how Beauvoir’s thinking evolved as a feminist and a philosopher – labels she was reluctant to embrace. The author reexamines the overemphasis on Beauvoir’s atheism, the extent of her political engagement, and her ethical failures in regard to third parties in the Sartre/Beauvoir relational triads. Beginning with her childhood to her adoption of Sylvie Le Bon, Kirkpatrick focuses on the significant relationships in Beauvoir’s life to expand our understand of how they shaped her thinking about the nature of subjectivity. Becoming Beauvoir demonstrates how the choices we make shape who we become.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current research project is on the intellectual history of feminist thought seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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William G. Pooley, "Body and Tradition in 19th-Century France: Félix Arnaudin and the Moorlands of Gascony, 1870-1914" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The moorlands of Gascony are often considered one of the most dramatic examples of top-down rural modernization in nineteenth-century Europe. From an area of open moors, they were transformed in one generation into the largest man-made forest in Europe.

Body and Tradition in Nineteenth-Century France: Félix Arnaudin and the Moorlands of Gascony, 1870-1914 (Oxford University Press) explores how these changes were experienced and negotiated by the people who lived there, drawing on the immense ethnographic archive of Felix Arnaudin (1844-1921).

The study places the songs, stories, and everyday speech that Arnaudin collected, as well as the photographs he took, in the everyday lives of agricultural workers and artisans. It argues that the changes are were understood as a gradual revolution in bodily experiences, as men and women forged new working habits, new sexual relations, and new ways of conceiving of their own bodies.

Rather than merely presenting a story of top-down reform, this is an account of the flexibility and creativity of the cultural traditions of the working population. William G. Pooley tells the story of the folklorist Arnaudin and the men and women whose cultural traditions he recorded, then uncovers the work carried out by Arnaudin to explore everyday speech about the body, stories of werewolves and shapeshifters, tales of animal cunning and exploitation, and songs about love and courtship.

The volume focuses on the lives of a handful of the most talented storytellers and singers Arnaudin encountered, showing how their cultural choices reflect wider patterns of behaviour in the region, and across rural Europe.

William G. Pooley, Lecturer in Modern European History, University of Bristol is a historian of France in the long nineteenth century, interested in popular and folk cultures.

Rachel Hopkin PhD is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio produce.

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Patrick Ffrench, "Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Suspicious of what he called the spectator's "sticky" adherence to the screen, Roland Barthes had a cautious attitude towards cinema. Falling into a hypnotic trance, the philosopher warned, an audience can become susceptible to ideology and "myth". In Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics (Bloomsbury), Patrick Ffrench explains that although Barthes was wary of film, he engaged deeply with it. Barthes' thought was, Ffrench argues, punctuated by the experience of watching films - and likewise his philosophy of photography, culture, semiotics, ethics and theatricality have been immensely important in film theory.

Focusing particularly on the essays 'The Third Meaning' and 'On Leaving the Cinema' and the acclaimed book Camera Lucida, Ffrench examines Barthes' writing and traces a persistent interest in films and directors, from Fellini and Antonioni, to Eisenstein, the Marx Brothers and Hitchcock. Ffrench explains that although Barthes found pleasure in "leaving the cinema" - disconnecting from its dangerous allure by a literal exit or by forcefully breaking the trance - he found value in returning to the screen anew. Barthes delved beneath the pull of progressing narrative and the moving image by becoming attentive to space and material aesthetics. This book presents an invaluable reassessment of one of the most original and subtle thinkers of the twentieth-century: a figure indebted to the movies.

Bill Schaffer is a semi-retired lecturer in Film Studies.

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Ronen Steinberg, "The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How did the "Reign of Terror" end? In his new book, The Afterlives of Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell University Press, 2019), Ronen Steinberg explores the end of "the Terror" of 1793-94 as a process that included a range of legal, material, ethical, psychological, and emotional challenges. From the vocabulary and stories people used to describe the experience of revolutionary violence, to debates about accountability, redress, and commemoration, Steinberg's book traces the complicated aftermaths of a period that different observers have since characterized as either a part of or apart from the Revolution and its values.

Throughout its caerful and provocative chapters, The Afterlives of Terror takes up concepts that have most often been used to think about and examine the Holocaust since the middle of the twentieth century: trauma, transitional justice, and coming to terms with the past. Not seeking to equate the violence of the Terror with the violence of the Holocaust, Steinberg nevertheless suggests that these frames can be used productively to ask questions about how people dealt with and responded to the Revolution's "difficult" past. Thinking with and through these powerful and relatively abstract ideas, each of the chapters in Afterlives remains grounded in specific historical cases and archival materials, illuminating how individuals, as well as the French state and society more broadly, experienced and negotiated the Terror's lasting impact. Adventurous in the questions it poses and the carefully researched and elucidated responses it develops, this compelling book will be of interest to readers working across multiple time periods, national contexts, and disciplines.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’ appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Stuart Elden, “Foucault: The Birth of Power” (Polity Press, 2017)

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

How did Foucault become a public, political intellectual? In Foucault: The Birth of Power (Polity Press, 2017), Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick, follows up his book on Foucault’s Last Decade with research on Foucault’s work from the late 1960s to the middle 1970s. As with Foucault’s work at the time, the book is focused on the emergence of a new understanding of power, alongside detailed engagements with archival materials and the recently published College De France lecture series. The book offers an alternative reading to traditional periodisations of Foucault’s work, suggesting engagements with ancient Greece, ‘repressive’ theories of power, and his public political work, can be rethought to add nuance and depth to current understandings of Foucault’s theories of the ‘productive’ nature of power and the practice of his scholarship. The book is part of Elden’s broader project on Foucault much of which is detailed on his Progressive Geographies blog. The rich and detailed text will be of interest to social theorists, Foucault scholars, and anyone interested in how best to understand the meaning of power.

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Marixa Lasso, "Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Many of our presumptions about the Panama Canal Zone are wrong; it was not carved out of uninhabited jungle, the creation of Lake Gatún did not flood towns and force them to move, people living in the zone prior to the construction of the canal were not out of step with modernity. In her new book, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Harvard University Press, 2019), Marixa Lasso argues compellingly that the construction of the Panama Canal prompted the destruction of a bustling network of towns, along with the livelihoods and democratic traditions of their inhabitants.

Alejandra Bronfman is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

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George MacLeod, "Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony After the Cold War" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

George MacLeod's book Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony After the Cold War (U Nebraska Press, 2023) explores how African and non-African Francophone authors, filmmakers, editors, and scholars have packaged, interpreted, and filmed the violent histories of post–Cold War Francophone Africa. This violence, much of which unfolded in front of Western television cameras, included the use of child soldiers facilitated by the Soviet Union’s castoff Kalashnikov rifles, the rise of Islamist terrorism in West Africa, and the horrific genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Through close readings of fictionalized child-soldier narratives, cinematic representations of Islamist militants, genocide survivor testimony, and Western scholarship, George S. MacLeod analyzes the ways Francophone African authors and filmmakers, as well as their editors and scholarly critics, negotiate the aesthetic, political, cultural, and ethical implications of making these traumatic stories visible. MacLeod argues for the need to periodize these productions within a “post–Cold War” framework to emphasize how shifts in post-1989 political discourse are echoed, contested, or subverted by contemporary Francophone authors, filmmakers, and Western scholars.

The questions raised in Mediating Violence from Africa are of vital importance today. How the world engages with and responds to stories of recent violence and loss from Africa has profound implications for the affected communities and individuals. More broadly, in an era in which stories and images of violence, from terror attacks to school shootings to police brutality, are disseminated almost instantly and with minimal context, these theoretical questions have implications for debates surrounding the ethics of representing trauma, the politicization of memory, and Africa’s place in a global (as opposed to a postcolonial or Euro-African) economic and political landscape.

Annie deSaussure holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University and is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College.

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Kelly Ricciardi Colvin, "Charm Offensive: Commodifying Femininity in Postwar France" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the French government cultivated images of sensual and sophisticated white French women in an attempt to reestablish its global image as a great nation. They promoted the beauty, sexual appeal, and general allure of French women, all while shrinking the boundaries of what was considered beautiful.

Charm Offensive: Commodifying Femininity in Postwar France (University of Toronto Press, 2023) by Dr. Kelly Colvin explores how this elevation of French femininity created problems on both sides of the equation: the pressure on French women to conform to an exacting physical standard was immense, while the inability of anyone else to access that standard resulted in a sense of failure. Drawing on cultural figures like Air France hostesses, tourism workers, and celebrities such as Brigitte Bardot, Charm Offensive offers an innovative understanding of a tumultuous time of decolonization.

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Anne E. Linton, "Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

A compelling study of medical and literary imaginations, Anne Linton's Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the complex relationship between modes of seeing, thinking, and writing intersex bodies and lives.

In this project, Linton brings a rich archive of medical cases from 1800 to 1902 into dialogue with canonical nineteenth-century authors (Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Emile Zola), as well as an impressive range of less well-known writers and popular fictions that captivated French readers during the period. Challenging the (Foucauldian) emphasis on the principle of a "true sex" that apparently preoccupied French doctors following the Napoleonic Code's regulation of sexual identification (within three days of birth), Linton looks at multiple instances in which the instability of sex, the uncertainties of bodies and their stories, came up again and again for medical and other observers. Revisiting the well-known case of Herculine Barbin, Linton situates Barbin's own account within the wider medical and literary worlds of nineteenth-century France. The book's earlier chapters lay a historical groundwork for subsequent closer readings of fictions that responded and contributed to a broader cultural fascination with sexual and gender identities, desires, and ambiguities.

While historically specific in its research and arguments, Unmaking Sex offers much to readers interested in the past and present politics of medical, legal, and cultural debates surrounding intersex people, with implications well beyond the French context.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.

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Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, "Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history.

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Katlyn Marie Carter, "Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions" (Yale UP, 2023)

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Katlyn Marie Carter, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (Yale UP, 2023) examines how debates over secrecy and transparency in politics during the eighteenth century shaped modern democracy.

Does democracy die in darkness, as the saying suggests? This book reveals that modern democracy was born in secrecy, despite the widespread conviction that transparency was its very essence.

In the years preceding the American and French revolutions, state secrecy came to be seen as despotic—an instrument of monarchy. But as revolutionaries sought to fashion representative government, they faced a dilemma. In a context where gaining public trust seemed to demand transparency, was secrecy ever legitimate? Whether in Philadelphia or Paris, establishing popular sovereignty required navigating between an ideological imperative to eradicate secrets from the state and a practical need to limit transparency in government. The fight over this—dividing revolutionaries and vexing founders—would determine the nature of the world’s first representative democracies.

Unveiling modern democracy’s surprisingly shadowy origins, Carter reshapes our understanding of how government by and for the people emerged during the Age of Revolutions.

Katlyn Marie Carter is assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. She lives in South Bend, IN.

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Sally Frances Low, "Colonial Law Making: Cambodia Under the French" (NUS Press, 2023)

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au.

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Troels Burchall Henningsen, "Western Intervention and Informal Politics: Simulated Statebuilding and Failed Reforms" (Routledge, 2021)

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Western Intervention and Informal Politics: Simulated Statebuilding and Failed Reforms (Routledge, 2021) by Dr. Troels Burchall Henningsen examines the political and military dynamic between threatened local regimes and Western powers, and argues that the power of informal politics forces local regimes to simulate statebuilding.

Reforms enabling local states to take care of their own terrorist and insurgency threats are a blueprint for most Western interventions to provide a way out of protracted internal conflicts. Yet, local regimes most often fail to implement reforms that would have strengthened their hand. This book examines why local regimes derail the reforms demanded by Western powers when they rely on their support to stay in power during existentially threatening violent crises.

Based on the political settlement framework, the author analyses how web-like networks of militarised elites require local regimes to use informal politics to stay in power. Four case studies of Western intervention are presented: Iraq (2011-2018), Mali (2011-2020), Chad (2005-2010), and Algeria (1991-2000). These studies demonstrate that informal politics narrows strategic possibilities and forces regimes to rely on coup-proofing military strategies, to continue their alliances with militias and former insurgents, and to simulate statebuilding reforms to solve the dilemma of satisfying militarised elites and Western powers at the same time.

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Jonathan Sumption, "Triumph and Illusion: The Hundred Years War, Vol. 5" (Faber & Faber, 2023)

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Triumph and Illusion (Faber & Faber, 2023) is the final volume of Jonathan Sumption's epic history of the Hundred Years War. It tells the story of the collapse of the English dream of conquest from the opening years of the reign of Henry VI, when the battles of Cravant and Verneuil consolidated their control of most of northern France, until the loss of all their continental dominions except Calais thirty years later.

This sudden reversal of fortune was a seminal event in the history of the two principal nation-states of western Europe. It brought an end to four centuries of the English dynasty's presence in France, separating two countries whose fortunes had once been closely intertwined. It created a new sense of national identity in both countries. The legacy of these events would influence their divergent fortunes for centuries to come.

Behind the clash of arms stood some of the most remarkable personalities of the age: the Duke of Bedford, the English Regent who ruled much of France from Paris and Rouen; Charles VII of France, underrated in both countries, who patiently rebuilt his kingdom after the disasters of his early years; the captains who populate the pages of Shakespeare - Fastolf, Montagu, Talbot, Dunois and, above all, the extraordinary figure of Joan of Arc who changed the course of the war in a few weeks at the age of seventeen.

Jonathan, Lord Sumption is the author of the justly acclaimed, five volume history of the Hundred Years’ War. In his professional life, he served for six years as a Justice of the British Supreme Court. He is a graduate of Eton & Oxford.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University.

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Yan Slobodkin, "The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Yan Slobodkin traces the history of famine in the modern French Empire, showing that hunger is intensely local and sweepingly global, shaped by regional contexts and the transnational interplay of ideas and policies all at once. By integrating food crises in Algeria, West and Equatorial Africa, and Vietnam into a broader story of imperial and transnational care, Dr. Slobodkin reveals how the French colonial state and an emerging international community took increasing responsibility for subsistence, but ultimately failed to fulfill this responsibility.

Europeans once dismissed colonial famines as acts of god, misfortunes of nature, and the inevitable consequences of backward races living in harsh environments. But as Dr. Slobodkin recounts, drawing on archival research from four continents, the twentieth century saw transformations in nutrition, scientific racism, and international humanitarianism that profoundly altered ideas of what colonialism could accomplish. A new confidence in the ability to mitigate hunger, coupled with new norms of moral responsibility, marked a turning point in the French Empire's relationship to colonial subjects—and to nature itself.

Increasingly sophisticated understandings of famine as a technical problem subject to state control saddled France with untenable obligations. The Starving Empire not only illustrates how the painful history of colonial famine remains with us in our current understandings of public health, state sovereignty, and international aid, but also seeks to return food—this most basic of human needs—to its central place in the formation of modern political obligation and humanitarian ethics.

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Poppy Corbett et al., "Creative Histories of Witchcraft: France, 1790–1940" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

How can researchers study magic without destroying its mystery? Drawing on a collaborative project between the playwright Dr. Poppy Corbett, the poet Anna Kisby Compton, and the historian Dr. William G. Pooley, Creative Histories of Witchcraft: France, 1790–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) presents thirteen tools for creative-academic research into magic.

These are illustrated through case studies from France (1790–1940) and examples from creative outputs: write to discover; borrow forms; use the whole page; play with footnotes; erase the sources; write short; accumulate fragments; re-enact; improvise; use dialogue; change perspective; make methods of metaphors; use props. These tools are ways to 'untell' the dominant narratives that shape stereotypes of the 'witch' which frame belief in witchcraft as ignorant and outdated. Writing differently suggests ways to think and feel differently, to stay with the magic, rather than explaining it away. The Element includes practical creative exercises to try as well as research materials from French newspaper and trial sources from the period.

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E. T. Dailey, "Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

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Jenny Benham, "International Law in Europe, 700–1200" (Manchester UP, 2022)

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Was there international law in the Middle Ages? Using treaties as its main source, International Law in Europe, 700-1200 (Manchester University Press, 2022) by Dr. Jenny Benham examines the extent to which such a system of rules was known and followed in the period 700 to 1200. It considers how consistently international legal rules were obeyed, whether there was a reliance on justification of action and whether the system had the capacity to resolve disputed questions of fact and law. The book further sheds light on issues such as compliance, enforcement, deterrence, authority and jurisdiction, challenging traditional ideas over their role and function in the history of international law.

International law in Europe, 700-1200 will appeal to students and scholars of medieval Europe, international law and its history, as well as those with a more general interest in warfare, diplomacy and international relations.

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Elizabeth M. Perego, "Humor and Power in Algeria, 1920 to 2021" (Indiana UP, 2023)

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In times of peace as well as conflict, humor has served Algerians as a tool of both unification and division. Humor has also assisted Algerians of various backgrounds and ideological leanings with engaging critically in power struggles throughout the country's contemporary history.

By analyzing comedic discourse in various forms (including plays, jokes, and cartoons), Humor and Power in Algeria, 1920 to 2021 (Indiana UP, 2023) demonstrates the globally informed and creative ways that civilians have made sense of moments of victory and loss through humor. Using oral interviews and media archives in Arabic, French, and Tamazight, Elizabeth M. Perego expands on theoretical debates about humor as a tool of resistance and explores the importance of humor as an instrument of war, peace, and social memory, as well as a source for retracing volatile, contested pasts.

Humor and Power in Algeria, 1920 to 2021 reveals how Algerians have harnessed humor to express competing visions for unity in a divided colonial society, to channel and process emotions surrounding a brutal war of decolonization and the forging of a new nation, and to demonstrate resilience in the face of a terrifying civil conflict.

Elizabeth M. Perego is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Appalachian State University. Her work has appeared in the Journal of North African Studies and the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher.

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Musab Younis, "On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought" (U California Press, 2022)

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought (U California Press, 2022) examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across the Atlantic between the two world wars. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Black intellectuals in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean established theories of colonialism and racism as structures that must be understood, and resisted, on a global scale. In this richly textured book, Musab Younis gathers the work of writers and poets, journalists and editors, historians and political theorists whose insights speak urgently to contemporary movements for liberation.

Bringing together literary and political texts from Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, France, the United States, and elsewhere, Younis excavates a vibrant and understudied tradition of international political thought. From the British and French colonial occupations of West Africa to the struggles of African Americans, the hypocrisy of French promises of 'assimilation, ' and the many-sided attacks on the sovereignties of Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia, On the Scale of the World shows how racialized imperialism provoked critical responses across the interwar Black Atlantic. By transcending the boundaries of any single imperial system, these counternarratives of global order enabled new ways of thinking about race, nation, and empire.

Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here.

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Emma R. Jones, "Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Many scholars have struggled with Irigaray’s focus on sexuate difference, in particular with her claim that it is “ontological,” wondering if this implies a problematically naïve or essentialist account of sexuate difference. As a result, the ethical vision which Irigaray elaborates has not been taken up in a robust way in the fields of philosophy, feminism, or psychoanalysis.

By tracing the notion of relation throughout Irigaray’s work, Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) identifies a rigorous philosophical continuity between the three self-identified “phases” in Irigaray’s thought (despite some critics’ concerns that there is a discontinuity between these phases) and clarifies the relational ontology that underlies Irigaray’s conceptualization of sexuate difference – one that always already implies an ethical project.

Jones demonstrates that an understanding of Irigaray’s Heideggerian inheritance – especially prominent in her later texts – is essential to grasping the sense of the idea that sexuate difference is ontological – it concerns Being, rather than beings. This book further develops potential applications of this ontological notion of a “relational limit” for the fields of philosophy, feminism, and psychotherapy.

Emma R. Jones is a psychotherapist in private practice in the San Francisco East Bay Area. She was educated at the New School, the University of Oregon, where she earned her PhD in philosophy; and the California Institute of Integral studies, where she earned her clinical degree. She is the author of several articles engaging the work of Luce Irigaray as well as phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and ancient Greek philosophy.

Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).

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Don Hollway, "Battle for the Island Kingdom: The Struggle for England's Destiny 1000-1066" (Osprey, 2023)

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In a saga reminiscent of Game of Thrones and Battle for the Island Kingdom: The Struggle for England's Destiny 1000-1066 (Osprey, 2023) reveals the life-and-death struggle for power which changed the course of history. The six decades leading up to 1066 were defined by bloody wars and intrigues, in which three peoples vied for supremacy over the island kingdom. In this epic retelling, Don Hollway (The Last Viking) recounts the clashes of Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and Normans, their warlords and their conniving queens.

It begins with the Viking Cnut the Great, forging three nations into his North Sea Empire while his Saxon wife Aelfgifu rules in his stead and schemes for England's throne. Her archenemy is Emma of Normandy, widow of Saxon king Aethelred, claiming Cnut's realm in exchange for her hand in marriage. Their sons become rivals, pawns in their mothers' wars until they can secure their own destinies. And always in the shadows is Godwin of Wessex, playing all sides to become the power behind the throne until his son Harold emerges as king of all of England.

But Harold's brother Tostig turns traitor, abandons the Anglo-Saxons and joins the army of the last great Viking, Harald Hardrada, where together they meet their fate at the battle of Stamford Bridge. And all this time watching from across the water is William, the Bastard, fighting to secure his own Norman dukedom, but with an eye on the English crown.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Barry Reay and Nina Attwood, "Dirty Books: Erotic Fiction and the Avant-garde in Mid-century Paris and New York" (Manchester UP, 2023)

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The books were written by young, impecunious writers, poets, and artists, many anonymously. Most of these pornographers wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided - men writing as women, and women writing as men - and some (Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller) went on to become influential figures in modernist literature.

Barry Reay and Nina Attwood's Dirty Books: Erotic Fiction and the Avant-garde in Mid-century Paris and New York (Manchester UP, 2023) tells the stories of these authors and their remarkable publishers: Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press and his son Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, whose catalogue and repertoire anticipated that of the more famous US publisher Grove Press. It offers a humorous and vivid snapshot of a fascinating moment in pornographic and literary history, uncovering a hidden, earlier history of the sexual revolution, when the profits made from erotica helped launch the careers of literary cult figures.

Nina Attwood is the author of The Prostitute's Body: Rewriting Prostitution in Victorian England (2011) and a co-author of Sex Addiction: A Critical History (2015)

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Writing the History of Money and Monetary Policy

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

What do the histories of currency and monetary policy tell us about societies at large, political structures, and cultures? Ekaterina Pravilova and Rebecca Spang tackle these questions, respectively, in two important books that examine the history of the Russian ruble from the time of Catherine the Great through the Soviet period, and the history of money during the time of time of the French Revolution. Their conversation delves not only into the past, but into the economic theories and assumptions that underlay the present. Pravilova is the author of The Ruble: A Political History (Oxford UP, 2023). Spang is the author of Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Harvard UP, 2017).

Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University.

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Jennifer Saltzstein, "Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2023) investigates how northern French vernacular poets and musicians writing in the late middle ages expressed relationships between people and their environments. It explores medieval French song through the critical and disciplinary lenses of ecocriticism and environmental history. The repertoire under scrutiny embraces the gamut of forms and genres of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French music, considering the songs of the trouvères, the ars antiqua motet, the formes fixes, the plays of Adam de la Halle, and the lyric-infused narrative poetry of Guillaume de Machaut. Although these works have never before been conceptualized as a corpus of nature poetry, they routinely evoke nature and the outdoors. They feature the gardens, meadows, and trees found in the countryside that many of their authors inhabited, and they conceptualize nature as crucial to poetic inspiration, to the fulfillment of desire, and as a space symbolic of the sacred. Through a deep contextualization of these songs and the people who wrote them, Song, Landscape, and Identity offers a novel account that demonstrates how song could present modalities of engagement with nature that were determined by geography, gender, and status. Key questions include: How realistic is the nature imagery in these songs? What ways of interaction with a landscape do they encourage? Where, and for whom, were such experiences available? The answers to these questions reposition medieval song as a privileged vehicle through which songwriters expressed relationships between nature, place, and class.

Jennifer Saltzstein is a Presidential Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches courses on the music of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque eras. She is author of The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013) and editor of Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

Áine Palmer is a PhD candidate in Music History at Yale University. Her work considers trouvère song and the anthologies that collect them in the long thirteenth century.

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Lucy Swanson, "The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction" (Liverpool UP, 2023)

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Believed to have emerged in the French Caribbean based on African spirit beliefs, the zombie represents not merely the walking dead, but also a walking embodiment of the region's history and culture. In Haiti today, the zombie serves as an enduring memory of enslavement: it is defined as a reanimated body robbed of part of its soul, forced to work in sugarcane fields. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, the zombie takes the form of a shape-shifting evil spirit, and represents the dangers posed to the maroon or 'freedom runner.'

Lucy Swanson's book The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study of the literary zombie in recent fiction from the region. It examines how this symbol of the enslaved (and of the evil spirits that threaten them) is used to represent and critique new socio-political situations in the Caribbean. It also offers a comprehensive and focused examination of the ways contemporary authors from Haiti and the French Antilles contribute to the global zombie imaginary, identifying four 'avatars' of the zombie-the slave, the trauma victim, the horde, and the popular zombie-that appear frequently in fiction and anthropology, exploring how works by celebrated and popular authors reimagine these archetypes.

Annie deSaussure, holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University. Her work focuses on minority regional languages, literatures, and cultures in contemporary France, radio, sound studies, and podcasting. Her most recent article on feminist discourses of motherhood in French podcasting was published in the “Podcasting Disruptive Voices” issue of CFC Intersections in July 2023.

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Charles Forsdick and Claire Launchbury, "Transnational French Studies" (Liverpool UP, 2023)

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

On the 16th October 2023, I met with Claire Launchbury and Charles Forsdick to discuss the recent publication of Transnational French Studies (Liverpool UP, 2023), a collection of essays that draws attention to the diverse objects of study and methodologies that can be brought to bear on French cultural production. This is the latest in the “Transnational Modern Languages” series published by Liverpool University press. The series furnishes frameworks and concrete examples of how to study languages and cultures through their interactions, rather than as isolated national traditions. It is especially of note that Transnational French Studies has been conceived as a handbook for students of French (at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels). The key objective of the volume is to define the core set of skills and methodologies that constitute the study of French culture as a transnational, transcultural and translingual phenomenon. Written by leading scholars within the field, chapters demonstrate the type of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities - both material and non-material - that are integral to what is referred to as French culture. The book is divided into four sections: Languages, Spaces, Temporalities and Subjectivities. These follow a detailed introduction written by the editors that comprehensively explains and situates “transnationalism” and its reception within contemporary French Studies.

The collection moves smoothly from literature to sociolinguistics to videogames and comics. In addition to its diverse subject matter, the edition makes a major contribution to French Studies by drawing attention to the complex ways that monolingualism can become conflated with monoculturalism in our discipline. Forsdick and Launchbury in their introduction stress that the “nation is a keyword that all students of France must interrogate in its historic and semantic complexity”. The collection’s historical breadth expands social scientific definitions of “transnationalism” and historicizes both “Frenchness” and the French language’s (and cultures’) evolutions. Individual essays explore histories of migration, flows of ideas and goods to demonstrate that “transnationalism” is not a contemporary phenomenon but a cultural disposition that extends back centuries.

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Ji Li, "At the Frontier of God's Empire: A Missionary Odyssey in Modern China" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

To a lively cast of international players that shaped Manchuria during the early twentieth century, At the Frontier of God's Empire: A Missionary Odyssey in Modern China (Oxford UP, 2023) adds the remarkable story of Alfred Marie Caubrière (1876-1948). A French Catholic missionary, Caubrière arrived in Manchuria on the eve of the Boxer Uprising in 1899 and was murdered on the eve of the birth of the People's Republic of China in 1948. Living with ordinary Chinese people for half a century, Caubrière witnessed the collapse of the Qing empire, the warlord's chaos that followed, the rise and fall of Japanese Manchukuo, and the emergence of communist China. Caubrière's incredible personal archive, on which Ji Li draws extensively, opens a unique window into everyday interaction between Manchuria's grassroots society and international players. His gripping accounts personalize the Catholic Church's expansion in East Asia and the interplay of missions and empire in local society.

Through Caubrière's experience, At the Frontier of God's Empire examines Chinese people at social and cultural margins during this period. A wealth of primary sources, family letters, and visual depictions of village scenes illuminate vital issues in modern Chinese history, such as the transformation of local society, mass migration and religion, tensions between church and state, and the importance of cross-cultural exchanges in everyday life in Chinese Catholic communities. This intense transformation of Manchurian society embodies the clash of both domestic and international tensions in the making of modern China.

Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw.

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Corry Cropper and Seth Whidden, "Velocipedomania: A Cultural History of the Velocipede in France" (Bucknell UP, 2022)

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today we are joined by Corry Cropper, a Professor of French at Brigham Young University, and one of two authors, alongside Seth Whidden, of Velocipedomania: A Cultural History of the Velocipede in France (Bucknell University Press, 2023). In our conversation we discussed the origin of the velocipede and how it illuminated the paradoxes of cultural life in Second Empire France.

In Velocipedomania, Cropper and Whidden argue that a close examination of the velocipede and the discourse around it both highlight the complexities of class, gender and modernity in late Second Empire France but also prefigure the links between the Third Republic and the French bicycle craze of the late 19th century. Through a close look at a range of primary sources, mostly drawn from 1868-1869, and carefully translated and reproduced in whole in the text, they demonstrate that the velocipede was more than a passing fad. The velocipede was instead a vital symbol of French modernity and tradition, masculinity and femininity, practicality and fancy, and machine power and body power.

The book contains four major sections. Each correspond to a different primary source or set of primary sources. The most significant of the texts is The Manual of the Velocipede, written by Richard Lesclide and illustrated by Emile Benassit. The Manual contains scientific articles, short stories, instructions on how to learn to ride a velocipede, and dozens of images that provided some of the earliest visual lexicons of bicycle riding. Cropper and Whidden reproduce complete translations of these sections, copies of the images, and unpack them in text and footnotes.

Cropper and Whidden’s text and footnotes provide necessary context and compelling analysis; the sources can also be read alone and excerpted for teaching. Their discussion of the Manual for example focuses on a series of themes: the carnivalesque, the social classes of the Second Empire, gender difference, the erotic, and the modern and the traditional.Readers interested in the gender politics of velocipede riding will discover both the progressive and the retrograde. Cropper and Whidden show how the velocipede fad opened the door to sporting women who were able to use the machine to travel further than ever before but public decorum and sartorial conventions still limited the ways that women were able to ride.

In a section called Note on Monsieur Michaux’s Velocipede, Cropper and Whidden solve a historical mystery. They identify the note’s author: a French naval officer de la Rue and velocipede enthusiast who invented the aquatic velocipede. De la Rue’s Note offered practical explanations for why the French state should invest in velocipedes, including the speed of telegraph delivery and the protection of the borders from smugglers. At the same time, he also emphasized the pleasure he derived from riding his cycle.

In the second chapter, Cropper and Whidden sketch out the history of velocipedes on stage. They show how velocipedes rolled into French opera following the liberalization of the medium during the final years of the Second Empire. Their translated text, Dagobert and his Velocipede, remains a very entertaining read. Their translation is joke dense and readers will need to flip between the text and footnotes to understand their witty and pun filled translation.

A final chapter examines velocipedes and poetry.

Cropper and Whidden’s innovative approach to unpacking the history of the velocipede, which so successfully integrates translated primary sources, should be read by scholars interested in French history and sports history. It will also be very useful in classroom teaching.

Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history.

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Paul Clammer, "Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom" (Hurst, 2023)

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

How did a Caribbean child, born into plantation slavery, come to defeat Napoleon's armies in battle and crown himself king of the first free black nation in the Americas? Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom (Hurst, 2023) is the story of Henry Christophe: one of the most remarkable, yet least known, figures from the Age of Revolution.

Christophe fought as a child soldier in the American War of Independence, before rising to prominence during the Haitian Revolution as one of Toussaint Louverture's top generals, commanding troops against Bonaparte's invasion. Following Haitian independence, Christophe's ambition for rule helped plunge the country into civil war. He crowned himself King Henry I of Haiti, and his attempts to build a modern black state won the support of leading British abolitionists.

Christophe saw himself as an Enlightenment ruler, and his kingdom produced great literary works, epic fortresses and opulent palaces. But while he was a proud anti-imperialist and fought off French plots against him, the Haitian people chafed under his rule. After ten years on the throne, he committed suicide rather than face being overthrown. Christophe's mountaintop Citadelle still stands, as Haiti's sole World Heritage site-a monument to a revolutionary black monarchy, in a world of empire and slavery.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Jonathan Downs, "Discovery at Rosetta: Revealing Ancient Egypt" (American University in Cairo Press, 2020)

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In 1798, young French general Napoleon Bonaparte entered Egypt with a veteran army and a specialist group of savants—scientists, engineers, and artists—his aim being not just conquest, but the rediscovery of the lost Nile kingdom. A year later, in the ruins of an old fort in the small port of Rosetta, the savants made a startling discovery: a large, flat stone, inscribed in Greek, demotic Egyptian, and ancient hieroglyphics. This was the Rosetta Stone, key to the two-thousand-year mystery of hieroglyphs, and to Egypt itself. Two years later, French forces retreated before the English and Ottoman armies, but would not give up the stone. Caught between the opposing generals at the siege of Alexandria, British special agents went in to find the Rosetta Stone, rescue the French savants, and secure a fragile peace treaty.

Jonathan Downs' book Discovery at Rosetta: Revealing Ancient Egypt (American University in Cairo Press, 2020) uses French, Egyptian, and English eyewitness accounts to tell the complete story of the discovery, decipherment, and capture of the Rosetta Stone, investigating the rivalries and politics of the time, and the fate of the stone today.

Madhumanti Datta completed her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California, USA. Her primary research area is the syntax of human languages, focussing on what possible and impossible structures in human language tell us about how linguistic structures are built, how meaning is represented and about the knowledge of grammar that speakers of a language intuitively possess. She is interested in issues surrounding language, both from the social and cultural perspective as well as from the biological perspective of language as a window into human cognition.

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John D. Garrigus, "A Secret Among the Blacks: Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A bold rethinking of the Haitian Revolution reveals the roots of the only successful slave uprising in the modern world.

Unearthing the progenitors of the Haitian Revolution has been a historical project of two hundred years. In A Secret Among the Blacks: Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution (Harvard UP, 2023), John D. Garrigus introduces two dozen Black men and women and their communities whose decades of resistance to deadly environmental and political threats preceded and shaped the 1791 revolt.

In the twenty-five miles surrounding the revolt’s first fires, enslaved people of diverse origins lived in a crucible of forces that arose from the French colonial project. When a combination of drought, trade blockade, and deadly anthrax bacteria caused waves of death among the enslaved in the 1750s, poison investigations spiraled across plantations. Planters accused, tortured, and killed enslaved healers, survivors, and community leaders for deaths the French regime had caused. Facing inquisition, exploitation, starvation, and disease, enslaved people devised resistance strategies that they practiced for decades. Enslaved men and women organized labor stoppages and allied with free Blacks to force the French into negotiations. They sought enforcement of freedom promises and legal protection from abuse. Some killed their abusers.

Through remarkable archival discoveries and creative interpretations of the worlds endured by the enslaved, A Secret Among the Blacks reveals the range of complex, long-term political visions pursued by enslaved people who organized across plantations located in the seedbed of the Haitian Revolution. When the call to rebellion came, these men and women were prepared to answer.

Brigid Wallace is a Graduate Student in the History Department at Lehigh University. (Twitter: @faithismine51)

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C. J. Wagevier, "Fighting for Napoleon's Army in Russia: A POW's Memoir" (Pen and Sword, 2023)

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In 1812 the French emperor Napoleon decided to invade Russia. For this purpose, he gathered an army of half a million men and women, consisting of soldiers from all nationalities, including French, German and Italian. Serving in this army was Carel Johannes Wagevier, an officer in the 125th Regiment of the Line, which was staffed by mostly Dutch soldiers. Full of confidence, they went to war and began the long journey to the East. What followed was a horrific expedition deep into the Russian interior, a chaotic retreat, and captivity. Just like his fellow soldiers, Wagevier endured the cold, the stresses of combat, and the hunger that besieged the army. After fighting at the battle of Berezina in November 1812, he was taken prisoner and transported all the way to the Russian interior. In 1814 he and his remaining fellow officers were released, and together they started the journey back home.

During his travels across Russia, he made notes of events that occurred or meetings that seemed memorable, including ones of unexpected generosity as well as sudden cruelty. These notes were later expanded into his memoir and published in 1820. Now, for the first time ever, they have been translated into English by Samuel De Korte in Fighting for Napoleon's Army in Russia: A POW's Memoir (Pen and Sword, 2023).

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Tracy Rutler, "Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature" (Oxford UP/Liverpool UP, 2021)

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Tracy Rutler's Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Liverpool UP, 2021) explores the imaginaries of novels and plays from the "liminal" period that followed the end of Louis the XIV's reign in France. Examining a range of French works from the 1730s and 1740s, including writing by Antoine François Prévost, Claude Crébillion, Pierre de Marivaux, and Françoise de Graffigny, Rutler traces a set of utopian themes and impulses that questioned and resisted heteronormativity and bourgeois family relations during this period. Interrogating gender, sexuality, and kinship in both the content and the form of their work, these authors challenged patriarchal power and relations as the foundations of state and society in France. At once intimate and political, the characters, scenes, and narratives these authors produced also posed questions about (the) Enlightenment more broadly.

In readings informed by thinkers like Foucault and Rancière, as well as the work of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theorists, Queering the Enlightenment is divided into three sections: Family Remains, Prodigal Sons, and Narrative Spinsters. Beginning with an analysis of eighteenth-century powerhouses Montesquieu and Voltaire on patriarchal decline and repair, Rutler goes on to consider literary representations of reproduction, masculinity, the public sphere, marriage, maternity, and same-sex community. The book will be of great interest to literary scholars and historians alike, particularly anyone interested the legacies of the Enlightenment and how historical struggles/debates over kinship, gender, and sexuality continue to resonate in the present.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.

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Rachel Chrastil, "Bismarck's War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe" (Basic Book, 2023)

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Among the conflicts that convulsed Europe during the nineteenth century, none was more startling and consequential than the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Deliberately engineered by Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the war succeeded in shattering French supremacy, deposing Napoleon III, and uniting a new German Empire. But it also produced brutal military innovations and a precarious new imbalance of power that together set the stage for the devastating world wars of the next century.

In Bismarck's War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe (Basic Book, 2023), historian Rachel Chrastil chronicles events on the battlefield in full, while also showing in intimate detail how the war reshaped and blurred the boundaries between civilian and soldier as the fighting swept across France. The result is the definitive history of a transformative conflict that changed Europe, and the history of warfare, forever.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Rebecca Kingston, "Plutarch's Prism: Classical Reception and Public Humanism in France and England, 1500–1800" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Throughout the early modern period, political theorists in France and England drew on the works of Plutarch to offer advice to kings and princes. Elizabeth I herself translated Plutarch in her later years, while Jacques Amyot's famous translations of Plutarch's The Parallel Lives led to the wide distribution of his work and served as a key resource for Shakespeare in the writing of his Roman plays, through Sir Thomas North's English translations.

Rebecca Kingston's Plutarch's Prism: Classical Reception and Public Humanism in France and England, 1500–1800 (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores how Plutarch was translated into French and English during the Renaissance and how his works were invoked in political argument from the early modern period into the 18th century, contributing to a tradition she calls 'public humanism'. This book then traces the shifting uses of Plutarch in the Enlightenment, leading to the decline of this tradition of 'public humanism'. Throughout, the importance of Plutarch's work is highlighted as a key cultural reference and for its insight into important aspects of public service.

Benjamin Phillips is an MA student in History at Ohio University. His primary field is Late Antique Cultural and Intellectual History.

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A Better Way to Buy Books

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.

Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Jacob Abell, "Spiritual and Material Boundaries in Old French Verse: Contemplating the Walls of the Earthly Paradise" (Medieval Institute Publications, 2023)

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Earthly Paradise was a vibrant symbol at the heart of medieval Christian geographies of the cosmos. As humanity’s primal home now lost through the sins of Adam of Eve, the Earthly Paradise figured prominently in Old French tales of lands beyond the mundane world. This study proposes a fresh look at the complex roles played by the Earthly Paradise in three medieval French poems: Marie de France’s The Purgatory of St. Patrick, Benedeit’s Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot, and Guillaume de Lorris’s The Romance of the Rose.

By examining the literary, cultural, and artistic components that informed each poem, Spiritual and Material Boundaries in Old French Verse: Contemplating the Walls of the Earthly Paradise (Medieval Institute Publications, 2023) advances the thesis that the exterior walls of the Earthly Paradise served evolving purposes as contemplative objects that implicitly engaged complex notions of economic solidarity and idealized community. These visions of the Earthly Paradise stand to provide a striking contribution to a historically informed response to the contemporary legacies of colonialism and the international refugee crisis.

Jacob Abell is Assistant Professor of French at Baylor University. His work focuses on ecocriticism, religious studies, and the digital humanities.

Becky Straple-Sovers is a medievalist and freelance editor who earned her Ph.D. in English at Western Michigan University in 2021. Her research interests include bodies, movement, gender, and sexuality in literature, as well as poetry of the First World War and the public humanities. She can be found on Twitter @restraple.

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Aleksandra Nicole Pfau, "Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France" (Amsterdam UP, 2020)

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The concept of madness as a challenge to communities lies at the core of legal sources. Aleksandra Pfau, Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) considers how communal networks, ranging from the locale to the realm, responded to people who were considered mad. The madness of individuals played a role in engaging communities with legal mechanisms and proto-national identity constructs, as petitioners sought the king’s mercy as an alternative to local justice. The resulting narratives about the mentally ill in late medieval France constructed madness as an inability to live according to communal rules. Although such texts defined madness through acts that threatened social bonds, those ties were reaffirmed through the medium of the remission letter. The composers of the letters presented madness as a communal concern, situating the mad within the household, where care could be provided. Those considered mad were usually not expelled but integrated, often through pilgrimage, surveillance, or chains, into their kin and communal relationships.

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Julian Jackson, "France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

There was a time when French people put up picture of Marshal Philippe Petain on their walls. He is a figure of immeasurable stature to the country of France. Victor of Verdun, a one-time minister of war, and finally, a traitor to his country. Or was he? Did Petain allow the stain of collaboration to tarnish his reputation, or did he use his figure to guard the French people from worse Nazi atrocities during the Vichy era? The answer to those questions would divide France in the years following World War II. The trial of Petain, which took place during a humid July in 1945, would leave some venerating the figure of Petain while others looked upon him as betrayer of the French people.

Professor Julian Jackson, is professor emeritus of history with Queen Mary University of London. His latest work is France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain published by Harvard University Press in 2023, covers the political trial of Marshal Petain for treason. Dr. Jackson has authored an award-winning biography of Charles de Gaulle and other works on the history of modern France including his next work an exploration of the life of Andre Gide.

Rick Northrop is an ex-journalist and undergraduate student in Calgary, Alberta Canada. He can be reached at rnorthrop2001@gmail.com

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Mary Edwards, "Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 04:00:00 -0000

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Isadore Ryan, "No Way Out: The Irish in Wartime France, 1939–1945" (Mercier Press, 2018)

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The experiences of the Irish in France during the war were overshadowed by the threat of internment or destitution. Up to 2,000 Irish people were stuck in occupied France after the defeat by Nazi Germany in June 1940. This population consisted largely of governesses and members of religious orders, but also the likes of Samuel Beckett, as well as a few individuals who managed to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up in internment camps (or worse). Isadore Ryan's book No Way Out: The Irish in Wartime France, 1939–1945 (Mercier Press, 2018) examines the engagement of the Irish in various forms of resistance. It also reveals that the attitude of some of the Irish towards the German occupiers was not always as clear-cut as politically correct discourse would like to suggest.

There are fascinating revelations, most notably that Ireland’s diplomatic representative in Paris sold quantities of wine to Hermann Göring; that Irish passports were given out very liberally (including to a convicted British rapist); that, in the early part of the war, some Irish ended up in internment camps in France and, through the slowness of the Irish authorities to intervene, were subsequently sent to concentration camps in Germany; and that a couple of Irish people faced criminal proceedings in France after the Liberation because of their wartime dealings with the Germans.

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Kory Olson, "The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris" (Liverpool UP, 2018)

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 13:22:48 -0000

When is the last time you looked at/consulted a paper map? Perhaps you have one hanging on a wall at home or work, framed or not. Or maybe you have some old road maps in a stack somewhere, as I do, sitting untouched since various digital forms have made printed map reading and handling something most of us rarely (if ever) do. Reading Kory E. Olson’s The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris (Liverpool University Press, 2018) reminded me how much I used to, and still sort of love maps, especially maps of the French capital. Coming at the history of urbanism through the city’s official maps over several decades, the book examines an evolving map discourse and literacy in France that was caught up with the evolution of technologies for producing, printing, and distributing maps; the history of public education; and the massive changes to the city brought about by industrialization, population growth, and new forms of transportation and mobility.

Pursuing the period that followed Haussmannization’s massive overhaul of the city, including those plans and changes that continued to be implemented for decades after Haussmann’s own tenure as Prefect of the Seine, The Cartographic Capital situates the urban geography of Paris and the very material of maps of the city at the heart of the story of Republican national consolidation, from the initial stabilization of the Third Republic to the 1930s. A history of depictions of the capital over time, the book also charts (!) a shift in the temporal orientation of maps, from their use as a form of historical documentation, to an emphasis on maps as accurate representations of geographic space in the present, to the emergence of maps intended to plan and shape the future of the city and its environs. Maps were a means by which government at different levels attempted to organize and control urban space. They were also a changing medium that reflected and shaped the geographic imaginations of map makers and map readers over time. The Cartographic Capital will be of tremendous interest to readers captivated by the history of Paris per se, as well as those fascinated by the histories of urbanism and space more broadly.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca)

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Aleksandra Nicole Pfau, "Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France" (Amsterdam UP, 2020)

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The concept of madness as a challenge to communities lies at the core of legal sources. Aleksandra Nicole Pfau's book Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France (Amsterdam UP, 2020) considers how communal networks, ranging from the locale to the realm, responded to people who were considered mad. The madness of individuals played a role in engaging communities with legal mechanisms and proto-national identity constructs, as petitioners sought the king's mercy as an alternative to local justice.

The resulting narratives about the mentally ill in late medieval France constructed madness as an inability to live according to communal rules. Although such texts defined madness through acts that threatened social bonds, those ties were reaffirmed through the medium of the remission letter. The composers of the letters presented madness as a communal concern, situating the mad within the household, where care could be provided. Those considered mad were usually not expelled but integrated, often through pilgrimage, surveillance, or chains, into their kin and communal relationships.

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Jon Stewart, "A History of Nihilism in the Nineteenth Century: Confrontations with Nothingness" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Nihilism - the belief that life is meaningless - is frequently associated with twentieth-century movements such as existentialism, postmodernism and Dadaism, and thought to result from the shocking experiences of the two World Wars and the Holocaust.

In A History of Nihilism in the Nineteenth Century: Confrontations with Nothingness (Cambridge UP, 2023), Jon Stewart shows that nihilism's beginnings in fact go back much further to the first half of the nineteenth century. He argues that the true origin of modern nihilism was the rapid development of Enlightenment science, which established a secular worldview. This radically diminished the importance of human beings so that, in the vastness of space and time, individuals now seemed completely insignificant within the universe. The author's panoramic exploration of how nihilism developed - not only in philosophy, but also in religion, poetry and literature - shows what an urgent topic it was for thinkers of all kinds, and how it has continued powerfully to shape intellectual debates ever since.

Jon Bartley Stewart is an American philosopher and historian of philosophy. He specializes in 19th century Continental philosophy with an emphasis on the thought of Kierkegaard and Hegel. Stewart currently works as a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovak Academy of Sciences

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Daniel Foliard, "The Violence of Colonial Photography" (Manchester UP, 2022)

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The late nineteenth century witnessed a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the first mass-produced cameras became available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and project an image of supremacy across the world.

Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers’ personal albums to the collections of press agencies and government archives, The Violence of Colonial Photography (Manchester UP, 2022) offers a new account of how conflict photography developed in the decades before the First World War. It explores the ways the camera was used to impose order on subject populations in Africa and Asia and to generate propaganda for the public in Europe, where a visual economy of violence was rapidly taking shape. At the same time, the book reveals how photographs could escape the intentions of their creators, offering a means for colonial subjects to push back against oppression.

Daniel Foliard is a Professor of Modern History at Université Paris Cité

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Michèle Miller Sigg, "Birthing Revival: Women and Mission in Nineteenth-Century France" (Baylor UP, 2022)

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The nineteenth century witnessed a flurry of evangelical and missionary activity in Europe and North America. This was an era of renewed piety and intense zeal spanning denominations and countries. One area of Protestant flourishing in this period has received scant attention in Anglophone sources, however: the French Réveil. Born of a rich Huguenot heritage but aimed at recovering the religion of the heart, this awakening gave birth to a dynamic missionary movement—and some of its chief agents were women.

In Birthing Revival: Women and Mission in Nineteenth-Century France (Baylor UP, 2022), Michèle Sigg sheds light on the seminal role French Protestant women played in launching and sustaining this movement of revival and mission. Out of the concerted efforts of these women arose a holistic mission strategy encompassing the home front and the foreign field. Parisian women, led by Émilie Mallet, established schools to provide infants with food, safety, and religious education. Mallet and her friend Albertine de Broglie led the women’s auxiliary of the Paris Bible Society to design and carry out a strategy for large-scale Bible distribution and fundraising. In 1825 de Broglie pioneered the women’s committee of the Paris Evangelical Mission Society, which used the Bible Society model to promote international missions across their many networks. In meetings, publications, and reports to the annual General Assembly, the women reflected on their calling in the work of mission and fully embraced their identity as "true missionaries."

The success of women teachers and their presence as wives and mothers in the Lesotho Mission—exemplified by pioneering missionary wife Elizabeth Lyndall Rolland—proved that married couples serving together as models of Christian living were essential in opening the doors to missionary work in Africa. The story, and these women’s legacies, does not end in the field, however. Sigg demonstrates how the educational work of the missionary wives and their publications that shared good news of growing faith in Lesotho sparked local revivals in France. When the enthusiasm of the Réveil waned in the metropole and divisions mounted among Protestants, a movement of deaconesses emerged to renew the faith of French Protestants.

Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity.

Sun Yong Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Ecumenics, studying World Christianity and the history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her research interests center on the history of Christianity in East Asia and Protestant missions. She is especially interested in women’s experiences in their mission encounters and their participation in the formation of Christianity and social changes. Her research expands to social theory of religion, church-state relations, and politics of religion.

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Robert Payne, "Reimagining the Family: Lesbian Mothering in Contemporary French Literature" (Peter Lang, 2021)

Sun, 23 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Robert Payne's Reimagining the Family: Lesbian Mothering in Contemporary French Literature (Peter Lang, 2021) is the first book-length study of representations of lesbian mothering in French literature. Focusing on female-authored texts published between 1970 and 2013, the book explores how literature reflects, engages with and even anticipates the recent, highly charged debates on the rights of same-sex couples and parents in France. Centered around the notion of «reimagining», the book examines how literature interrogates the normative definition of the family as a heterosexual, biological unit. It discusses a range of themes, including the difficulty of reconciling lesbianism with mothering, the role of the father, the identity of the co-mother and issues of difference and equality. The corpus includes both well-known and previously unstudied authors, and covers a range of genres, from autobiography to popular fiction. Collectively, the texts offer privileged insights into the increasingly relevant experiences of lesbian mothers and illustrate the changing face of the family in twenty-first-century France.

Salvador Lopez Rivera is a PhD candidate in French language and literature at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Erin Pettigrew, "Invoking the Invisible in the Sahara: Islam, Spiritual Mediation, and Social Change" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Sun, 23 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Invoking the Invisible in the Sahara: Islam, Spiritual Mediation, and Social Change (Cambridge UP, 2022), Erin Pettigrew utilizes invisible forces and entities - esoteric knowledge and spirits - to show how these forms of knowledge and unseen forces have shaped social structures, religious norms, and political power in the Saharan West. Situating this ethnographic history in what became la Mauritanie under French colonial rule and, later the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Pettigrew traces the changing roles of Muslim spiritual mediators and their Islamic esoteric sciences - known locally as l'ḥjāb - over the long-term history of the region. By exploring the impact of the immaterial in the material world and demonstrating the importance of Islamic esoteric sciences in Saharan societies, she illuminates peoples' enduring reliance upon these sciences in their daily lives and argues for a new approach to historical research that takes the immaterial seriously.

Erin Pettigrew is an associate professor of History and Arab Crossroads Studies at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is a historian of Africa specializing in West African colonial and postcolonial history with a focus on Muslim societies. Her research has focused on the cultural history of Islam, slavery, race, gender, and nation in what she calls "the Saharan West," or what is today primarily the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

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Owen Stanwood, "The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Owen Stanwood's newest book, The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire (Oxford UP, 2019), places the history of Huguenot refugees in a global context, the first truly international history of the diaspora. In the early modern world these French Protestant exiles scattered around the world, fleeing persecution following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The story begins with dreams of Eden, as religious migrants sought to build perfect societies far from the political storms of Europe. In order to build these communities, however, the Huguenots needed patrons, forcing them to navigate the world of empires. The refugees promoted themselves as a chosen people, religious heroes who also possessed key skills that could strengthen the British and Dutch states. This embrace of empire led to a gradual assimilation. For over a century, they learned that only by blending in and by mastering foreign institutions could they prosper. While the Huguenots never managed to find a utopia or to realize their imperial sponsors' visions of profits, The Global Refuge demonstrates how this diasporic community helped shape the first age of globalization and influenced the reception of future refugee populations.

Elspeth Currie is a PhD student in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.

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Mani Sharpe, "Late-Colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Late-Colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence, Mani Sharpe peploys the term “late-colonial” to describe (mostly) French films made during, and in response to, the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Sharpe argues that late-colonial cinema represents a formally and thematically important, yet unappreciated tendency in French cinema; one that has largely been overshadowed by a scholarly focus on the French New Wave. Sharpe contends that whilst late-colonial French cinema cannot be seen as a coherent cinematic movement, school of filmmaking, or genre, it can be seen as a coherent ethical trend, with many of the fifteen central case studies explored in Late-colonial French Cinema filtering the Algerian War of Independence through a discourse of “redemptive pacifism”.

Dr. Mani Sharpe about Late-Colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence out in 2023 with Edinburgh University Press. Dr. Sharpe is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Leeds. He previously taught Film Studies at Newcastle University and La Sorbonne – Paris 3. Dr. Sharpe’s areas of expertise include: cinema and war; film studies; violence and visuality; de-colonisation; contemporary film theory; French cinema; the French New Wave; cultural studies; defacement; and the politics of the close-up. Dr. Sharpe earned his B.A. and M.A. at Leeds and his Ph.D. at Newcastle University. He is the author of several articles on late-colonial French cinema, having published in French Studies, Journal of European Studies, Journal of War and Culture Studies, and Studies in French Cinema, amongst others.Late-colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence is his first book.

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Katherine Giuffre, "Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A cultural revolution in England, France, and the United States beginning during the time of the industrial and political revolutions helped usher in modernity. This cultural revolution worked alongside the better documented political and economic revolutions to usher in the modern era of continuous revolution.

Focusing on the period between 1847 and 1937, Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Katherine Giuffre examines in depth six of the cultural "battles" that were key parts of this revolution: the novels of the Brontë sisters, the paintings of the Impressionists, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the Ballets Russes production of Le Sacre du printemps, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Using contemporaneous reviews in the press as well as other historical material, we can see that these now-canonical works provoked outrage at the time of their release because they addressed critical points of social upheaval and transformation in ways that engaged broad audiences with subversive messages. This framework allows us to understand and navigate the cultural debates that play such an important role in 21st century politics.

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Nicole Bauer, "Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Between September 1793 and July 1794, the French politicians and even the general public seemed positively overcome by the urge to denounce their peers: helping so-called crimes, devious machinations, and secret plots come to light. When the so-called “Reign of Terror” ended, however, liberal, radical, and conservative critics of the era alike continued to suggest that the problem was not an excess of public denunciations, but so many shadowy dealings that had yet to be revealed. By early nineteenth century France, transparency had taken hold as an almost necessary precondition to government legitimacy and public trust.

In her new book, Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Nicole Bauer traces the emergence of this discourse and the rejection of secrecy over the course of the eighteenth century. Bauer’s cultural and political history of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France argues that while secrecy was at first envisioned as a way to ensure privacy and honor, it eventually came to be seen as proof of weakness, treachery, and, ultimately, betrayal. Her careful reading of sources—from lettres de cachet to Gothic novels—helps her parse this complex subject and sheds new light on the emergence of key modernizing concepts like public opinion and government transparency that we now often take for granted. Filled with riveting and dramatic stories about prisoners, spies, and screams in the night, Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy is both academically rigorous and a real page-turner.

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James Crossland, "The Rise of Devils: Fear and the Origins of Terrorism" (Manchester UP, 2023)

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the dying light of the nineteenth century, the world came to know and fear terrorism. Much like today, this was a time of progress and dread, in which breakthroughs in communications and weapons were made, political reforms were implemented and immigration waves bolstered the populations of ever-expanding cities. This era also simmered with political rage and social inequalities, which drove nationalists, nihilists, anarchists and republicans to dynamite cities and discharge pistols into the bodies of presidents, police chiefs and emperors. This wave of terrorism was seized upon by an outrage-hungry press that peddled hysteria, conspiracy theories and, sometimes, fake news in response, convincing many a reader that they were living through the end of days.

Against the backdrop of this world of fear and disorder, The Rise of Devils: Fear and the Origins of Terrorism (Manchester UP, 2023) chronicles the journeys of the men and women who evoked this panic and created modern terrorism - revolutionary philosophers, cult leaders, criminals and charlatans, as well as the paranoid police chiefs and unscrupulous spies who tried to thwart them. In doing so, this book explains how radicals once thought just in their causes became, as Pope Pius IX denounced them, little more than 'devils risen up from Hell'.

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Lia Brozgal and Rebecca Glasberg, eds., "A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean: A Collection of Stories Curated by Lela Sebbar" (U California Press, 2023)

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean: A Collection of Stories Curated by Lela Sebbar (U California Press, 2023) brings together the fascinating personal stories of Jewish writers, scholars, and intellectuals who came of age in lands where Islam was the dominant religion and everyday life was infused with the politics of the French imperial project. Prompted by novelist Leïla Sebbar to reflect on their childhoods, these writers offer literary portraits that gesture to a universal condition while also shedding light on the exceptional nature of certain experiences. The childhoods captured here are undeniably Jewish, but they are also Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Turkish; each essay thus testifies to the multicultural, multilingual, and multi-faith community into which its author was born. The present translation makes this unique collection available to an English-speaking public for the first time. The original version, published in French in 2012, was awarded the Prix Haïm Zafrani, a prize given by the Elie Wiesel Institute of Jewish Studies to a literary project that valorizes Jewish civilization in the Muslim world.

Translation by Lia Brozgal, Jane Kuntz, Rebekah Vince and Robert Watson.

A free ebook version of this title is available here.

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Chris Millington, "The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939 (Stanford UP, 2023) investigates the political and social imaginaries of 'terrorism' in early twentieth-century France. Chris Millington traces the development of how the French conceived of terrorism, from the late nineteenth-century notion that terrorism was the deed of the mad anarchist bomber, to the the fraught political clashes of the 1930s when terrorism came to be understood as a political act perpetrated against French interests by organized international movements.

Through a close analysis of a series of terrorist incidents and representations thereof in public discourse and the press, the book argues that contemporary ideas of terrorism in France as 'unFrench'--i.e., contrary to the ideas and values, however defined, that make up 'Frenchness'--emerged in the interwar years and subsequently took root long before the terrorist campaigns of Algerian nationalists during the 1950s and 1960s. Millington conceptualizes 'terrorism' not only as the act itself, but also as a political and cultural construction of violence composed from a variety of discourses and deployed in particular circumstances by commentators, witnesses, and perpetrators. In doing so, he argues that the political and cultural battles inherent to perceptions of terrorism lay bare numerous concerns, not least anxieties over immigration, antiparliamentarianism, representations of gender, and the future of European peace.

Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements.

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Susan McCall Perlman, "Contesting France: Intelligence and US Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

With the defeat of France in 1940 by the Germans during World War II, its status as a world power was deeply shaken. It wasn't until the liberation by the Allies in 1944 that France was able to rebuild itself but faced many challenges both external and internal. Externally, the war against Germany still waged until May 1945. At the same time, the emerging Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union meant France would be forced to pick sides. Internally, the legacy of polarized politics of the 1930s remained with the supporters of Charles de Gaulle on one side and the French Communist Party (PCF) on the other side.

In the midst of this volatile mix were the American administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman trying to determine on how best American foreign policy towards France should proceed in the post-liberation era. A common perception promoted by American diplomats in France was that the country was deeply weakened by the German wartime occupation and was on the verge of not only civil war but a Communist takeover as well. This perception would be a major driving force in American foreign policy in the first years of the Cold War. It also marked the beginning of a complex dynamic between diplomacy and intelligence within the U.S. government. This gripping story is the subject of Susan McCall Perlman's Contesting France: Intelligence and US Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Susan McCall Perlman is Professor of History and Intelligence Studies at the National Intelligence University. She has published widely on US foreign relations and intelligence and is the 2020 recipient of the Robert Beland Excellence in Teaching Award.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Brett Brehm, "Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature" (Fordham UP, 2023)

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature (Fordham University Press, 2023) reexamines the development of mechanical sound recording technology by charting the orbits of writers, scientists, and artists in France and the United States. Working between comparative literature, the history of science, and urban studies, Dr. Brett Brehm builds a bridge between visual culture and sound studies.

Kaleidophonic Modernity places the poet and inventor Charles Cros and his lover, the celebrated concert pianist and salonnière Nina de Villard at the heart of modern aesthetic and scientific vanguards. Cros's scientific endeavors ranged from color photography, to telecommunications, to mechanical sound reproducibility. In his poetry the Surrealists found an ancestor and inspiration. His literary and scientific works prove startling and relevant to predicaments of technological media in his own time and ours. For nearly twenty years Nina de Villard presided over a supremely daring intellectual salon. There, she welcomed manifold literary, artistic, and musical luminaries into a veritable crucible of the artistic avant-garde and precursor to the famous Chat Noir cabaret. Together, these two forgotten but pivotal figures, Cros and Villard, help reframe our thinking on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walt Whitman, icons of urban modernity who can now be seen and heard in a kaleidophonic light, one that offers a compelling new perspective on modern mediascapes.

In elaborating this transatlantic phenomenon, Kaleidophonic Modernity illuminates the prehistory of the phonograph as it intersects with the aesthetics of sound reproducibility, Franco-American literary exchange, Poe’s aesthetic and intellectual legacy, the sounds of modern cities and technologies, and the genealogy of audiovisual experimentation found in such movements as Dada, Futurism, and the sound art of today.

Annie deSaussure, holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University and is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College. Her work focuses on minority regional languages, literatures, and cultures in contemporary France, radio, sound studies, and podcasting. Her most recent article on feminist discourses of motherhood in French podcasting is forthcoming in the 2023 special issue, “Podcasting Disruptive Voices,” of CFC Intersections.

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J. P. Daughton, "In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism" (Norton, 2021)

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

J. P. Daughton's In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism (W. W. Norton, 2021) examines the complex and violent French construction of a line of railroad in Equatorial Africa from the coast inland. Begun in 1921, the Congo-Océan took 13 years to complete and resulted in the deaths of between 15,000 and 23,000 African lives. Daughton's book is a careful account of the brutality, harrowing labor conditions, and deprivation of these thousands of Africans whose very bodies were abused and destroyed in this iteration of the "civilizing mission" and "modernity" in empire.

Working through a broad range of archives located in France, Switzerland, the U.S., and the Congo, the book's several chapters outline in visceral detail the individuals and structures involved in making the railroad a reality, from the forced enlistment of African labourers, through the challenges of resistant landscape, the suffering of those physically tasked with its conquest, to the justifying rhetoric of those who championed the project and the denunciations of those who sought to reveal its atrocious human cost.

Key individual architects, company, and government representatives appear throughout these pages along with the powerful forces and voices of the French imperial state. Working with and against the presentation of the project in official documents, Daughton seeks to illuminate the experiences and voices of the African workers who made the railroad a reality. Completed by the 1930s, the Congo-Océan was also a large-scale humanitarian failure. Interested in broader questions of colonial violence and how scholars engage with and respond to that violence, Daughton's narrative and analysis will be accessible to wide range of readers. This, despite the difficult and painful subjects and stories it takes on.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.

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Jonathan Abel, "Guibert's General Essay on Tactics" (Brill, 2021)

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

"'The God of War' is near to revealing himself, because we have heard his prophet." So wrote Jean Colin, naming Napoleon the God of War and Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, comte de Guibert, as his prophet. Guibert was the foremost philosopher of the Military Enlightenment, dedicating his career to systematizing warfare in a single document. The result was his magnum opus, The General Essay on Tactics, which helped to lay the foundation for the success of French armies during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In Jonathan Abel's Guibert's General Essay on Tactics (Brill, 2021), it is presented in English for the first time since the 1780s, with extensive annotation and contextualization.

Jonathan Abel is Assistant Professor of Military History at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Aomar Boum, "Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Fri, 26 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the lead-up to World War II, the rising tide of fascism and antisemitism in Europe foreshadowed Hitler's genocidal campaign against Jews. But the horrors of the Holocaust were not limited to the concentration camps of Europe: antisemitic terror spread through Vichy French imperial channels to France's colonies in North Africa, where in the forced labor camps of Algeria and Morocco, Jews and other "undesirables" faced brutal conditions and struggled to survive in an unforgiving landscape quite unlike Europe. In Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa (Stanford UP, 2023), historian Aomar Boum and illustrator Nadjib Berber take us inside this lesser-known side of the traumas wrought by the Holocaust by following one man's journey as a Holocaust refugee.

Hans Frank is a Jewish journalist covering politics in Berlin, who grows increasingly uneasy as he witnesses the Nazi Party consolidate power and decides to flee Germany. Through connections with a transnational network of activists organizing against fascism and anti-Semitism, Hans ultimately lands in French Algeria, where days after his arrival, the Vichy regime designates all foreign Jews as "undesirables" and calls for their internment. On his way to Morocco, he is detained by Vichy authorities and interned first at Le Vernet, then later transported to different camps in the deserts of Morocco and Algeria. With memories of his former life as a political journalist receding like a dream, Hans spends the next year and a half in forced labor camps, hearing the stories of others whose lives have been upended by violence and war.

Through bold, historically inflected illustrations that convey the tension of the coming war and the grimness of the Vichy camps, Aomar Boum and Nadjib Berber capture the experiences of thousands of refugees through the fictional Hans, chronicling how the traumas of the Holocaust extended far beyond the borders of Europe.

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Robert Kershaw, "Dünkirchen 1940: The German View of Dunkirk" (Osprey, 2022)

Tue, 23 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The surprise success of the German offensive in the West that commenced on May 10, 1940 caught the Allies completely off-guard, and France would soon capitulate to the Germans in late June. During the course of the campaign, large numbers of Allied forces would become trapped along the coast of the English Channel at the port of Dunkirk. The mass evacuation of Allied forces at the port of Dunkirk in 1940 is often considered one of the most iconic moments of the Second World War (1939-1945), demonstrating the resolve of the British in particular to carry on the fight against Nazi Germany. This image was portrayed in Christopher Nolan's blockbuster film Dunkirk (2017).

By extension, the mass evacuation of Allied forces is also often considered a "missed opportunity" on the part of the Germans to deal a decisive blow to the British war effort. How exactly did the German High Command and German soldiers interpret the situation at Dunkirk? Through extensive research into German military archives, historian Robert Kershaw was able to provide an answer in his book Dünkirchen 1940: The German View of Dunkirk (Osprey Publishing, 2022).

Robert Kershaw is a graduate of Reading University. He joined the Parachute Regiment in 1973 and ultimately commanded 10 PARA. He attended the German Staff College, spending a further two years with the Bundeswehr as an infantry, airborne and arctic warfare instructor. He speaks fluent German. On leaving the British Army in 2006 he became a full-time author and a military analyst. He has recorded for BBC radio and published frequent magazine and newspaper articles. Two of his books have been serialized in the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. He lives in Salisbury, England.

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Empires after World War II: The Cases of the USSR and France

Sat, 20 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Where lay the fissures of Soviet power in Eastern Europe during the Cold War? Why did France fail in its postwar efforts to make its African colonies part of France itself? In two complementary books, Rachel Applebaum and Emily Marker explore the soft-power mechanisms of the Soviet and French empires after World War II. Their findings shed light on not only the distinctive characteristics of postwar empires, but on the reasons why Soviet internationalism and the unique French model of decolonization ultimately failed. Applebaum is author of Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia (Cornell UP, 2019). Marker is the author of Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era (Cornell UP, 2022).

Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University.

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Algeria and France: Grievances and the Effects of Decolonialism

Thu, 18 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI's director, John Torpey interviewed Laetitia Bucaille about the factors that explain variation in resentment and grievances in former colonies drawing from the cases of Algeria and South Africa. Bucaille delves deeper into the case of Algeria and the affected populations whose identities were crossed cut by institutions and personal experiences as a former colony. Moreover, she explains how Algeria, considered not a colony but a French territory, still implemented discriminating laws against native Algerians who were deemed as second-class citizens. Finally, the author discusses the long-lasting consequences of this decolonization process and how it gets intertwined with politics and anti-Islam narratives in France.

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Matt Dawson, "The Political Durkheim: Sociology, Socialism, Legacies" (Routledge, 2023)

Wed, 17 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

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Matthew Jagel, "Khmer Nationalist: Sơn Ngc Thành, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia" (Northern Illinois UP, 2023)

Mon, 15 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Khmer Nationalist: Sơn Ngc Thành, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) is a political history of Cambodia from World War II until 1975, examining the central role of Sõn Ngoc Thành. The book is a story of nationalist movements, political intrigue, coup attempts, war, and American intelligence operations. Matthew Jagel shows how central Sõn Ngoc Thành was to the rise of Cambodian nationalism, the brief period of Japanese dominance, the fight for independence from France, and the establishment of ties with the United States. Factoring Sõn Ngoc Thành into a discussion of Cambodian political history is a major contribution that will advance scholarly discourse about Cold War politics in Southeast Asia. Sõn Ngoc Thành’s career requires us to think about pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia with much greater nuance.

Dr. Matthew Jagel earned his MA at Northern Illinois University with a thesis entitled “PHILCAG: The History of Filipino Involvement in the Vietnam War” and his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Sõn Ngoc Thành (the source material for this book). Khmer Nationalist: Son Ngoc Thanh, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia is his first book. He has taught at Northern Illinois University and worked for NIU’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Dr. Jagel currently teaches at St. Xavier University in Chicago. When he’s not doing all this amazing academic work, he’s causing trouble with Dr. Eric Jones, his co-host and unindicted co-conspirator, on Napalm in the Morning: The Vietnam War through Film, a podcast that asks serious questions about why John Wayne is facing the wrong way at sunset in The Green Berets and praises the artistic triumph that is Operation Dumbo Drop.

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Annabel L. Kim, "Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

Sun, 14 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Annabel Kim's second book*, Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) digs into fecal matter as a preoccupation of modern French literature. Inspired by the author's observations of a certain "fecal blindness" among student and other readers of French literature, Cacaphonies examines a series of canonical authors and texts through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which shit plays a powerful role as the work and waste of bodies and a figure of radical equality.

Throughout its five chapters, the book examines the writing of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, Romain Gary, Anne Garréta, and Daniel Pennac. Reading the role that fecal matter plays in the works of these authors, Cacaphonies considers the materiality of shit in relationship to French identity, democracy, and universalism. It also explores the excrementalities of writing, literature, and literary studies more broadly. Provocative in the aesthetic and political projects it presents and interrogates, Cacaphonies is smart and engrossing, a wonderful and also really, really shitty book.

*I last spoke with Annabel Kim in 2019 about her book Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminsit Fictions (The Ohio State University Press, 2018). You can listen to that interview here.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.

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Brian Valente-Quinn, "Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa" (Northwestern UP, 2021)

Sat, 06 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Brian Valente-Quinn is an Associate Professor of Francophone African studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His book, Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa, was published at Northwestern University Press in 2021. Senegalese Stagecraft explores the theatrical stage in Senegal as a site of poetic expression, political activism, and community engagement. In their responses to the country’s colonial heritage, as well as through their innovations on the craft of theater‑making, Senegalese performers have created an array of decolonizing stage spaces that have shaped the country’s theater history. Their work has also addressed a global audience, experimenting with international performance practices while proposing new visions of the role of culture and stagecraft in society.

Through a study of the innovative work of Senegalese theater-makers from the 1930s onward, Senegalese Stagecraft explores a wide range of historical contexts and themes, including French colonial education, cultural Pan‑Africanism, West African Sufism, uses of television and mass media, and popular theater and activism. Using a multidisciplinary approach that includes field, archival, and literary methods, Valente‑Quinn offers a fresh look at performance cultures of West Africa and the Global South in a book that will interest students and scholars in African, Francophone, and performance studies.

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Deborah Bauer, "Marianne Is Watching: Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and the Origins of the French Surveillance State" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

Mon, 01 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the wake of its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the French Third Republic sought to rebuild its strength to avenge its defeat and secure itself as a major world power. To help achieve these ends, the first professional intelligence services were created to help secure French interests against all possible enemies - both foreign and internal. This gripping story of French intelligence during the late nineteenth century is the subject of Deborah Bauer's Marianne Is Watching: Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and the Origins of the French Surveillance State (‎University of Nebraska Press, 2021).

Dr. Deborah Bauer is an associate professor of history at Purdue University Fort Wayne. Her research has focused primarily on the cultural, diplomatic, and military history of France and the French Empire at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Macs Smith, "Paris and the Parasite: Noise, Health, and Politics in the Media City" (MIT Press, 2021)

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The social consequences of anti-parasitic urbanism, as efforts to expunge supposedly biological parasites penalize those viewed as social parasites. According to French philosopher Michel Serres, ordered systems are founded on the pathologization of parasites, which can never be fully expelled.

In Paris and the Parasite: Noise, Health, and Politics in the Media City (MIT Press, 2021), Macs Smith extends Serres's approach to Paris as a mediatic city, asking what organisms, people, and forms of interference constitute its parasites. Drawing on French poststructuralist theory and philosophy, media theory, the philosophy of science, and an array of literary and cultural sources, he examines Paris and its parasites from the early nineteenth century to today, focusing on the contemporary city. In so doing, he reveals the social consequences of anti-parasitic urbanism.

Salvador Lopez Rivera is a PhD candidate in French language and literature at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Rachel Anne Gillett, "At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Rachel Gillett's At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the world of the French "Jazz Age" in the years after the First World War. Tracing the common ground and differences between communities of African American, French Antillean, and French West African artists who lived, performed, and interacted with one another in the French capital during the 1920s and 30s, the book asks questions about Blackness, Frenchness, colonialism, racism, identity, and solidarity through a focus on the experiences of a diversity of historical actors and sources. Connecting the rich and complex world of entertainment to social and political change and resistance, the book draws attention to class and gender as well as race to think through issues of nationalism, transnational movement and exchange, and anti-colonialism. Its chapters work with a range of materials including police records, recordings, biography and autobiography, and a wealth of images of/from the diverse Parisian cultural life the era.

Pushing beyond the well-established history of white responses to Black musical forms (Jazz and the Biguine) during this period, the book emphasizes the perspective of Black observers, including the famous Nardal sisters of Martinique, who commented on the varied cultural and political effects of artists and performances. The book will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of music, race, and exchanges across the Atlantic, including different points within the French empire during this period. And the legacies of this moment continue to resonate in France and beyond a century later.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.

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The Roots of Equity and Equality: A Conversation with Teresa Bejan

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The ideas of equity and equality are all over the news, yet there seems to be little agreement on what exactly each term means. Political theorist and intellectual historian Teresa Bejan of Oriel College, Oxford discusses the origins of our notions of equality, from the Roman Empire to the present, focusing particularly on Early Modernity and the influence of the French Revolution and the English political movements like the Levellers, Diggers, and Quakers. Along the way, she uncovers the surprising facts like the relationship between equality and hierarchy, and that Marx was not as pro-equality as popularly believed.

Her recent 3-part Charles E. Test lecture series for the Madison Program, “First Among Equals”

Her book Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Harvard UP, 2019).

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Laura Hobson Faure, "A 'Jewish Marshall Plan': The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France" (Indiana UP, 2022)

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

While the role the United States played in France’s liberation from Nazi Germany is widely celebrated, it is less well known that American Jewish individuals and organizations mobilized to reconstruct Jewish life in France after the Holocaust. In A 'Jewish Marshall Plan': The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France (Indiana UP, 2022), Laura Hobson Faure explores how American Jews committed themselves and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring much needed aid to their French coreligionists.

Hobson Faure sheds light on American Jewish chaplains, members of the Armed Forces, and those involved with Jewish philanthropic organizations who sought out Jewish survivors and became deeply entangled with the communities they helped to rebuild. While well intentioned, their actions did not always meet the needs and desires of the French Jews.

A 'Jewish Marshall Plan' examines the complex interactions, exchanges, and solidarities created between American and French Jews following the Holocaust. Challenging the assumption that French Jews were passive recipients of aid, this work reveals their work as active partners who negotiated their own role in the reconstruction process.

Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

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Celeste Day Moore, "Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France" (Duke UP, 2021)

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Celeste Day Moore is a historian of African American culture, media, and Black internationalism in the twentieth century. Her first book, Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France (Duke University Press, 2021), was awarded the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. Her research has appeared in American Quarterly, the Journal of African American History, and the first edited volume of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). She received her doctorate from the University of Chicago and has been a fellow at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. As an associate professor of history at Hamilton College, she teaches courses on African American history as well as histories of empire, race, Black internationalism, and U.S. international relations.

In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media: the US military's wartime records and radio programs; the French record industry's catalogs of blues, jazz, and R&B recordings; the translations of jazz memoirs; a provincial choir specializing in spirituals; and US State Department-produced radio programs that broadcast jazz and gospel across the French empire. In each of these contexts, individual intermediaries such as educators, producers, writers, and radio deejays imbued African American music with new meaning, value, and political power. Their work resonated among diverse Francophone audiences and transformed the lives and labor of many African American musicians, who found financial and personal success as well as discrimination in France. By showing how the popularity of African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of racism and imperialism, Moore demonstrates this music's centrality to postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements.

Annie deSaussure, holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University and is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College. Her work focuses on minority regional languages, literatures, and cultures in contemporary France, with a focus on the region of Brittany, the historical and artistic dimensions of radio in France, and podcasting.

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Hope Williard, "Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms: Venantius Fortunatus and His Contemporaries" (ARC Humanities Press, 2022)

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Hope Williard's book Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms: Venantius Fortunatus and His Contemporaries (Arc Humanities Press, 2022) explores how one early medieval poet survived and thrived amidst the political turbulence of sixth century Gaul—with a little help from his friends. Born in northern Italy, Venantius Fortunatus made his career writing for and about members of the Merovingian elite. Although he is no longer dismissed as an opportunistic poetaster who wrote undistinguished flattery for undeserving kings and aristocrats, his work remains unduly neglected. This book reframes Fortunatus as a writer uniquely suited to his times, a professional poet who addressed his contemporaries’ needs and wishes for the prestige and sophistication of Classical culture. His poems and letters enabled his aristocratic patrons to situate themselves in networks, which they made and maintained in order to navigate a post-imperial but not post-Roman world. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of friendship in the Middle Ages and offers a fresh look at the Frankish kingdoms of Merovingian Gaul.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Stuart Elden, "The Archaeology of Foucault" (Polity, 2022)

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

How did Foucault’s thought develop in the 1960s? In The Archaeology of Foucault (Polity, 2022) Stuart Elden, a professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick, completes the series of intellectual biographies of Foucault he began with Foucault's Last Decade. Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished and unavailable material, the book charts Foucault’s career from the end of his doctoral studies to his election to chair the Collège de France. In addition to considering key texts including Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge, the book discusses his work as a literary and artistic critics, key shifts in his politics, and his teaching career. The final text in a remarkable and brilliant series, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in Foucault. You can hear previous episodes Foucault's Last Decade, Foucault: The Birth of Power and The Early Foucault on the New Books Network, and Prof Elden blogs at Progressive Geographies.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

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Incognito: The Astounding Life of Alexandra David-Neel

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

I grew up with Alexandra David-Neel’s books on my mum’s bookshelf. She was part of the myth making process that led to my own fascination with Tibet, as something real, and as fantasy, a description that is often used to define Neel’s relationship and presentation of Tibet. She was either a key that helped open the door into the world of Tibet with its Lamas, Vajrayana Buddhism, and enormous mountains and planes, or another in the long line of westerners who turned Tibet into a romantic, western fantasy.

In this episode, I talk to Diane Harke, author of Incognito: The Astounding Life of Alexandra David-Neel (Sumeru Press, 2016). We look back at David-Neel, her life, and Tibet. She was also a life-long anarchist, feminist, explorer, and prolific author. We discuss her encounters with the 13th Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama and her legacy in creating an image of Tibet and Buddhism that enticed the likes of Alan Watts and Gary Snyder to venture Eastwards.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Jill Jarvis, "Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony" (Duke UP, 2021)

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony (Duke UP, 2021), Jill Jarvis examines the crucial role that writers and artists have played in cultivating historical memory and nurturing political resistance in Algeria, showing how literature offers the unique ability to reckon with colonial violence and to render the experiences of those marginalized by the state.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Melanie Heath, "Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the past thirty years, polygamy has become a flashpoint of conflict as Western governments attempt to regulate certain cultural and religious practices that challenge seemingly central principles of family and justice. In Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance (Stanford UP, 2023), Melanie Heath comparatively investigates the regulation of polygamy in the United States, Canada, France, and Mayotte. Drawing on a wealth of ethnographic and archival sources, Heath uncovers the ways in which intimacies framed as "other" and "offensive" serve to define the very limits of Western tolerance.

These regulation efforts, counterintuitively, allow the flourishing of polygamies on the ground. The case studies illustrate a continuum of justice, in which some groups, like white fundamentalist Mormons in the U.S., organise to fight against the prohibition of their families' existence, whereas African migrants in France face racialized discrimination in addition to rigid migration policies. The matrix of legal and social contexts, informed by gender, race, sexuality, and class, shapes the everyday experiences of these relationships. Heath uses the term "labyrinthine love" to conceptualise the complex ways individuals negotiate different kinds of relationships, ranging from romantic to coercive.

What unites these families is the secrecy in which they must operate. As government intervention erodes their abilities to secure housing, welfare, work, and even protection from abuse, Heath exposes the huge variety of intimacies, and the power they hold to challenge heteronormative, Western ideals of love.

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Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson, "Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games" (MIT Press, 2023)

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (MIT Press, 2023) by Dr. Mary Flanagan & Dr. Mikael Jakobsson is a striking analysis of popular board games' roots in imperialist reasoning—and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it.

Board games conjure up images of innocuously enriching entertainment: family game nights, childhood pastimes, cooperative board games centered around resource management and strategic play. Yet in Playing Oppression, Dr. Flanagan and Dr. Jakobsson apply the incisive frameworks of postcolonial theory to a broad historical survey of board games to show how these seemingly benign entertainments reinforce the logic of imperialism.

Through this lens, the commercialized version of Snakes and Ladders takes shape as the British Empire's distortion of Gyan Chaupar (an Indian game of spiritual knowledge), and early twentieth-century “trading games” that fêted French colonialism are exposed for how they conveniently sanitized its brutality while also relying on crudely racist imagery. These games' most explicitly abhorrent features may no longer be visible, but their legacy still lingers in the contemporary Eurogame tendency to exalt (and incentivize) cycles of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination.

An essential addition to any player's bookshelf, Playing Oppression deftly analyzes this insidious violence and proposes a path forward with board games that challenge colonialist thinking and embrace a much broader cultural imagination.

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Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew S. Curran, "Who's Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Who's Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race (Harvard University Press, 2022) is the first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of black skin. In 1739 Bordeaux's Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of "blackness." The authors ranged from naturalists to physicians, theologians to amateur savants. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why.

Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic by the time the contest was announced. The essays themselves represent a broad range of opinions. Some affirm that Africans had fallen from God's grace; others that blackness had resulted from a brutal climate; still others emphasized the anatomical specificity of Africans. All the submissions nonetheless circulate around a common theme: the search for a scientific understanding of the new concept of race. More importantly, they provide an indispensable record of the Enlightenment-era thinking that normalized the sale and enslavement of Black human beings. Translated into English and accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, each essay included in this volume lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West.

Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network

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Joseph W. Peterson, "Sacred Rivals: Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-Century France and Algeria" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Upon the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, the territory quickly became a placeholder for French dreams, debates, and experiments in social engineering, economic development and even religious culture. Missionaries and Jesuit priests sent to minister to the new French colonial population there commented favorably on Arab Muslims’ religiosity, seeing in it both the possibility of effective missionization and an example of how religion and civil society might work together. After decades of failed missionary efforts, violent conquest and conflict, and influential international events, liberal Catholics in Algeria like the Bishop Charles Lavigerie—founder of the White Fathers—had abandoned active evangelization and instead embraced a visceral and violent rejection of racialized Islam as the antithesis of French civilization.

These transitionary decades serve as the backdrop to Joseph W. Peterson’s wide-ranging and deeply human book, Sacred Rivals: Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-century France and Algeria (Oxford UP, 2022). In it, he tells that stories of French Catholic missionaries and the Algerian men and women with whom they interacted, exploring the gray areas between faith and politics, between colonial ideology and colonized experience. Peterson balances micro-historical approaches with an awareness of global events to tell a new story about the role of religion in the development of the French civilizing mission, colonial ethnography and racial pseudo-science, as well as in the construction of regimes of legal difference. Sacred Rivals is deeply readable book and will be of interest to scholars of French Algeria, colonialism, and all those interested in the long and complex history of Christianity and Islam.

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Charlie Samuelson, "Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature" (Ohio State UP, 2022)

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature (Ohio State UP, 2022), Charlie Samuelson casts queerness in medieval French texts about courtly love in a new light by bringing together for the first time two exemplary genres: high medieval verse romance, associated with the towering figure of Chrétien de Troyes, and late medieval dits, primarily associated with Guillaume de Machaut. In close readings informed by deconstruction and queer theory, Samuelson argues that the genres’ juxtaposition opens up radical new perspectives on the deviant poetics and gender and sexual politics of both. Contrary to a critical tradition that locates the queer Middle Ages at the margins of these courtly genres, Courtly and Queer emphasizes an unflagging queerness that is inseparable from poetic indeterminacy and that inhabits the core of a literary tradition usually assumed to be conservative and patriarchal. Ultimately, Courtly and Queer contends that one facet of texts commonly referred to as their “courtliness”—namely, their literary sophistication—powerfully overlaps with modern conceptions of queerness.

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Bernard D. Geoghegan, "Code: From Information Theory to French Theory" (Duke UP, 2023)

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan traces the shared intellectual and political history of computer scientists, cyberneticists, anthropologists, linguists, and theorists across the humanities as they developed a communication and computational-based theory that grasped culture and society in terms of codes.

In Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke UP, 2023), Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early accounts of cybernetics and digital media by theorists including Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray. His analysis casts light on how media-practical research forged common epistemic cause in programs that stretched from 1930s interwar computing at MIT and eugenics to the proliferation of seminars and laboratories in 1960s Paris. This mobilization ushered forth new fields of study such as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology while forming enduring intellectual affinities between the humanities and informatics. With Code, Geoghegan offers a new history of French theory and the digital humanities as transcontinental and political endeavors linking interwar colonial ethnography in Dutch Bali to French sciences in the throes of Cold War-era decolonization and modernization.

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Chris Bongie, trans. and ed., "The Colonial System Unveiled by Baron de Vastey" (Liverpool UP, 2014)

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Long neglected in mainstream history books, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now being claimed across a range of academic disciplines as an event of world-historical importance. The former slaves' victory over their French masters and the creation of the independent nation of Haiti in 1804 is being newly heralded not only as a seminal moment in the transnational formation of the 'black Atlantic' but as the most far-reaching manifestation of 'Radical Enlightenment'.

The best known Haitian writer to emerge in the years after the revolution is Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), who authored over ten books and pamphlets between 1814 and his murder in 1820. His first and most incendiary work, Le système colonial dévoilé (1814), provides a moving invocation of the horrors of slavery in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Its trailblazing critique of colonialism anticipates by over a hundred years the anticolonial politics (and poetics) of Césaire, Fanon, and Sartre. Translated here for the first time by Chris Bongie, The Colonial System Unveiled by Baron de Vastey (Liverpool UP, 2014) will be compulsory reading for scholars across the humanities.

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Azzan Yadin-Israel, "Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Dr. Azzan Yadin-Israel presents a journey into the mystery behind why the forbidden fruit became an apple, upending an explanation that stood for centuries.

Dr. Yadin-Israel reveals that Eden’s fruit, once thought to be a fig or a grape, first appears as an apple in twelfth-century French art. He then traces this image back to its source in medieval storytelling. Though scholars often blame theologians for the apple, accounts of the Fall written in commonly spoken languages—French, German, and English—influenced a broader audience than cloistered Latin commentators. Dr. Yadin-Israel shows that, over time, the words for “fruit” in these languages narrowed until an apple in the Garden became self-evident. A wide-ranging study of early Christian thought, Renaissance art, and medieval languages, Temptation Transformed offers an eye-opening revisionist history of a central religious icon.

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Marnia Lazreg, "Foucault's Orient: The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan" (Berghahn Books, 2020)

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 05:00:00 -0000

Foucault lived in Tunisia for two years and travelled to Japan and Iran more than once. Yet throughout his critical scholarship, he insisted that the cultures of the “Orient” constitute the “limit” of Western rationality.

Using archival research supplemented by interviews with key scholars in Tunisia, Japan and France, Marnia Lazreg's Foucault's Orient: The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan (Berghahn Books, 2020) examines the philosophical sources, evolution as well as contradictions of Foucault’s experience with non-Western cultures. Beyond tracing Foucault’s journey into the world of otherness, the book reveals the personal, political as well as methodological effects of a radical conception of cultural difference that extolled the local over the cosmopolitan.

I asked Marnia how young philosophers should read Foucault's texts and also how she has integrated his concepts into her excellent sociological research that focuses on the world outside the "West." Her insightful advice should be taken into account when approaching any works of Foucault today.

Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. He is the editor of the European Journal of Japanese Philosophy. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience.

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Bewitchment, Possession, and the Diabolical Arts: Daily Life in New France

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In this podcast episode, Greg Marchildon interviews Mairi Cowan, the author of The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada, a microhistory of bewitchment and demonic possession in New France. This account of the possession of Barbe Hallay serves as an example of the social and religious history in and around 17th-century Quebec. With these stories, Cowan illustrates the daily fears and anxieties of people of New France and details how this case of possession compares to others of the period. She provides a social and religious history that delves into beliefs about witchcraft, demonology, religion, Catholicism, power of the church, accepted social behaviours, and the overall precarious position of the colony during this era. Mairi Cowan is Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, at the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga with a cross appointment to the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy. She is a historian of the late medieval and early modern world, with specializations in the social and religious histories of Scotland and New France. She is also an officer of the Champlain Society. This podcast was produced by Jessica Schmidt.

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Chantelle Gray, "Anarchism After Deleuze and Guattari: Fabulating Futures" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Deleuze and Guattari never identified as anarchists, nor do they seem to know much about its historical development or continued praxis. Yet their individual and collective work belies this apparent and wilful oversight through a steady consideration of revolutionary subjectivity and active political experimentation.

In Anarchism After Deleuze and Guattari: Fabulating Futures (Bloomsbury, 2022). Chantelle Gray argues that while we cannot - and should not - attempt to call them anarchists, their work resonates with core anarchist principles such as prefiguration, careful experimentation and emergent strategies aimed at creating a feeling that life is worth living. This involves paying attention to both joyous affects and sad passions, which necessitates the affirmation of all of chance and, from that, fabulating new modes of existence. By bringing together the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari with the theory and practices of anarchism, this book demonstrates that fabulating the future is nothing short of a noetic act, making reasonable something which initially was senseless.

Chantelle Gray is an Associate Professor in the School of Philosophy at North-West University, South Africa.

Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt

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Jonathan Ervine, "Humour in Contemporary France: Controversy, Consensus and Contradictions" (Liverpool UP, 2019)

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Thinking through serious questions about racial, ethnic, and religious difference, Jonathan Ervine’s Humour in Contemporary France: Controversy, Consensus and Contradictions (Liverpool University Press, 2019) traces the ways that comedy pulls communities apart and brings them together in the French context. Ervine began the research for this project in advance of the fatal Charlie Hebdo shootings of 2015. The book he published four years later starts with an analysis of the intense debates about humour and freedom of the press that proliferated in the wake of these violent and tragic events.

Situating Charlie Hebdo within the context of French humour more broadly, and turning to stand-up/sketch comedy in particular, Ervine’s remaining three case studies approach issues of universalism, cultural and political conflict using a range of examples. Focused on the provocations of the Black comedian Dieudonné, the Jamel Comedy Club, and the television series A part ça tout vie bien, the book examines: antiracism and antisemitism, minority comedians, urban culture, the legacies of immigration, and the complex relationship between Islam and comedy in contemporary France. Considering the possibilities and politics of multiculturalism in and through comedy, the book is a vital source for readers interested in what does and doesn’t make different French people laugh, and why.

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Spencer D. Segalla, "Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Spencer Segalla’s Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954 (U Nebraska Press, 2021) explores natural and anthropogenic disasters during the years of decolonization and Cold War. Four disasters make up the core of the book: the 1954 earthquake in Algeria’s Chélif Valley, just weeks before the onset of the Algerian Revolution; a mass poisoning in Morocco in 1959 caused by toxic substances from an American military base; the 1959 Malpasset dam collapse in Fréjus, France, which devastated the Algerian immigrant community in the town but which was blamed on Algerian sabotage; and the 1960 earthquake in Agadir, Morocco, which set off a public relations war between the United States, France, and the Soviet Union, and which ignited a Moroccan national debate over modernity, identity, architecture, and urban planning. Spencer Segalla argues for the integration of environmental events into narratives of political and cultural decolonization. Empire and Catastrophe will interest environmental historians, North Africa area studies specialists, and historians of France and French imperialism. Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954 is available open access online for no charge.

Dr. Segalla, professor of history at the University of Tampa, completed his Ph.D. at Stonybrook in 2003. In addition to Empire and Catastrophe, he has published The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912-1956 with the University of Nebraska Press in 2009.

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War, Plague, and Confession in Fourteenth-Century Provence

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Nicole Archambeau, associate professor of history at Colorado State University, talks about her book, Souls under Siege: Stories of War, Plague, and Confession in Fourteenth-Century Provence (Cornell University Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The book explores how the inhabitants of southern France made sense of the ravages of successive waves of plague, the depredations of mercenary warfare, and the violence of royal succession. Many people, Archambeau finds, understood both plague and war as the symptoms of spiritual sicknesses caused by excessive sin, and they sought cures in confession. Archambeau and Vinsel also discuss the important lessons historians can teach about working to understand people who are quite different from ourselves.

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The Future of the European Left

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Why is it so hard for left wing parties in the West to win elections? Some such as the UK Labour Party have headed to the centre. The history of Labour since 1979 tells the story – their record goes lost, lost, lost, lost, Blair, Blair, Blair, lost, lost, lost, lost. But what does heading the centre consist of? And are their alternative strategies? Listen to Owen Bennett Jones discuss leftist parties and what they need to do to win with Eunice Goes of the Richmond American International University.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Harry Gamble, "Contesting French West Africa: Battles Over Schools and the Colonial Order, 1900–1950" (U Nebraska Press, 2017)

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

After the turn of the twentieth century, schools played a pivotal role in the construction of French West Africa. But as this dynamic, deeply researched study reveals, the expanding school system also became the site of escalating conflicts. As French authorities worked to develop truncated schools for colonial "subjects," many African students and young elites framed educational projects of their own. Weaving together a complex narrative and rich variety of voices, Harry Gamble explores the high stakes of colonial education.

With the disruptions of World War II, contests soon took on new configurations. Seeking to forestall postwar challenges to colonial rule, French authorities showed a new willingness to envision broad reforms, in education as in other areas. Exploiting the new context of the Fourth Republic and the extension of citizenship, African politicians demanded an end to separate and inferior schools.

Harry Gamble's book Contesting French West Africa: Battles Over Schools and the Colonial Order, 1900–1950 (U Nebraska Press, 2017) critically examines the move toward educational integration that took shape during the immediate postwar period. Growing linkages to the metropolitan school system ultimately had powerful impacts on the course of decolonization and the making of postcolonial Africa.

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Stuart Carroll, "Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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On Émile Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life" (1912)

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Steven Lukes about Émile Durkheim's classic The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). Lukes is the author of Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study among many other works.

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Emile Durkheim sets himself the task of discovering the enduring source of human social identity. He investigates what he considered to be the simplest form of documented religion - totemism among the Aborigines of Australia. For Durkheim, studying Aboriginal religion was a way "to yield an understanding of the religious nature of man, by showing us an essential and permanent aspect of humanity." The need and capacity of men and women to relate to one another socially lies at the heart of Durkheim's exploration, in which religion embodies the beliefs that shape our moral universe.

The Elementary Forms has been applauded and debated by sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, philosophers, and theologians, and continues to speak to new generations about the intriguing origin and nature of religion and society.

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Marxists and Mystics: A Vatican Journalist Discusses her Biography of Madeleine Delbrêl and the New Papal Constitution

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 21:00:00 -0000

Vatican journalist Colleen Dulle discusses her biography of the French Mystic Madeleine Delbrêl, author of The Marxist City as Mission Territory (1957), and Catholic evangelist among the urban poor of Ivry. Colleen calls Madeleine the “Dorothy Day of France.” Colleen and I also talk about her career reporting on the Vatican as part of America Media, Pope Francis’s new Apostolic Constitution, and her pilgrimage to the Holy Land with Fr. James Martin.

Inside the Vatican podcast
The Pope’s Voice podcast
Colleen Dulle’s 2018 article, “Who is Madeleine Delbrêl—the “French Dorothy Day” Pope Francis made venerable this weekend?”
“Go Rebuild My House” blog

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Rousseau's Ideas About Censorship in the Arts

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In 1982, the Institute held a multi day discussion of censorship. In this session from the Vault, sociologist Richard Sennett talks about Jean Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about censorship in the arts.

The discussion is moderated by Aryeh Neier, and includes Sidney Morgenbesser, Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodskey, Richard Gillman, Frances Fitzgerald, Karen Kennerly, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Michael Scammell.

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Philippe-Richard Marius, "The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), Philippe-Richard Marius recasts the world-historical significance of the Saint-Domingue Revolution to investigate the twinned significance of color/race and class in the reproduction of privilege and inequality in contemporary Haiti. Through his ethnography, class emerges as the principal site of social organization among Haitians, notwithstanding the country’s global prominence as a “Black Republic.” It is class, and not color or race, that primarily produces distinctive Haitian socioeconomic formations.

When Marius arrived in Port-au-Prince to begin fieldwork for this monograph, to him and to legions of people worldwide, Haiti was axiomatically the first Black Republic. Descendants of Africans did in fact create the Haitian nation-state on January 1, 1804, as the outcome of a slave uprising that defeated white supremacy in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Haiti’s Founding Founders, as colonial natives, were nonetheless to varying degrees Latinized subjects of the Atlantic. They envisioned freedom differently than the African-born former slaves, who sought to replicate African nonstate societies. Haiti’s Founders indeed first defeated native Africans’ armies before they defeated the French. Not surprisingly, problematic vestiges of colonialism carried over to the independent nation.

Marius interrogates Haitian Black nationalism without diminishing the colossal achievement of the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue in destroying slavery in the colony, then the Napoleonic army sent to restore it. Providing clarity on the uses of race, color, and nation in sociopolitical and economic organization in Haiti and other postcolonial bourgeois societies, Marius produces a provocative characterization of the Haitian nation-state that rejects the Black Republic paradigm.

Philippe-Richard Marius is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island (CUNY). Marius has conducted extensive fieldwork in Haiti. He is writer, producer, and codirector of the film A City Called Heaven.

Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

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Peter Hudis, "Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades" (Pluto Press, 2015)

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a Caribbean and African psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary whose works, including Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth are hugely influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and post-Marxism. His legacy remains with us today, having inspired movements in Palestine, Sri Lanka, the US and South Africa.

Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (Pluto Press, 2015) is a critical biography of his extraordinary life. Peter Hudis draws on the expanse of his life and work - from his upbringing in Martinique and early intellectual influences to his mature efforts to fuse psychoanalysis and philosophy and contributions to the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria - to counter the monolithic assumption that Fanon's contribution to modern thought is defined by the advocacy of violence.

Mehdi Sanglaji is writing a PhD thesis on political violence, religion, and all that jazz.

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Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Mediterranean

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

For most of human history, the Mediterranean was home to a significant number of pastoralists, who herded livestock along seasonal migratory routes. Today, traces of this pastoralist presence have all but disappeared. Dr. Andrea Duffy's book Nomad's Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the 19th-Century Mediterranean World (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) seeks to answer the question - what caused the decline and retreat of Mediterranean pastoralism? Dr. Duffy explores the development of a French environmental policy which was centered around forestry and afforestation, and led to the targeting and demonization of pastoralists not only in France but throughout the Mediterranean world. In this episode, Dr. Duffy joins me to talk about pastoralism in 19th-century France, Algeria, and Anatolia, nomadism vs. transhumance, environmentalism past and present, and the legacies of pastoralism around the Mediterranean today.

Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License.

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Siv B. Lie, "Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France (U Chicago Press, 2021) shows how relationships between racial identities, jazz, and national belonging become entangled in France.

Jazz manouche—a genre known best for its energetic, guitar-centric swing tunes—is among France’s most celebrated musical practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It centers on the recorded work of famed guitarist Django Reinhardt and is named for the ethnoracial subgroup of Romanies (also known, often pejoratively, as “Gypsies”) to which Reinhardt belonged. French Manouches are publicly lauded as bearers of this jazz tradition, and many take pleasure and pride in the practice while at the same time facing pervasive discrimination. Jazz manouche uncovers a contradiction at the heart of France’s assimilationist republican ideals: the music is portrayed as quintessentially French even as Manouches themselves endure treatment as racial others.

In Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France (U Chicago Press, 2021), Siv B. Lie explores how this music is used to construct divergent ethnoracial and national identities in a context where discussions of race are otherwise censured. Weaving together ethnographic and historical analysis, Lie shows that jazz manouche becomes a source of profound ambivalence as it generates ethnoracial difference and socioeconomic exclusion. As the first full-length ethnographic study of French jazz to be published in English, this book enriches anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical scholarship on global jazz, race and ethnicity, and citizenship while showing how music can be an important but insufficient tool in struggles for racial and economic justice.

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

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Julia Elsky, "Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France" (Stanford UP, 2020)

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. But under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, these Jewish émigré writers—among them Irène Némirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet—continued to write in their adopted language, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws. In Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France (Stanford UP, 2020), Julia Elsky argues that these writers reexamined both their Jewishness and their place as authors in France through the language in which they wrote.

The group of authors Elsky considers depicted key moments in the war from their perspective as Jewish émigrés, including the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris, life in the occupied and southern zones, the roundups and internment camps, and the Resistance in France and in London. Writing in French, they expressed multiple cultural, religious, and linguistic identities, challenging the boundaries between center and periphery, between French and foreign, even when their sense of belonging was being violently denied.

Julia Elsky is Assistant Professor of French at Loyola University Chicago.

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Eren Duzgun, "Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Western interpretations of the Ottoman age of reform and the Turkish Republic often evaluate these histories against an idealized, essentialized narrative of the European history, in which a triumphant bourgeois class instigated transitions to political liberalism and capitalism. Consequently, their explanations of persistent authoritarian tendencies and statist economic development policies focus on what features of European modernity are missing or insufficiently present in Turkey.

In Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity (Cambridge UP, 2022), Eren Duzgun, argues that this approach to comparative historical analysis not only fails to grasp Ottoman and Turkish history on its own terms, but it also gets European history wrong by overlooking the variety of trajectories of political and economic development that characterized European history from the age of revolutions onwards. Duzgun argues that the concept of Jacobinism holds the key to understanding both Ottoman and Turkish modernization and transitions to modernity in continental Europe that did not correspond to the narrative of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ that undergirds both liberal and Marxist theories of modernization. We will discuss the origins of the Jacobin route to modernity, how the Jacobin model relates to common understandings of capitalist political economies, and why a book about Turkish and Ottoman history needed a chapter on French history.

Eren Duzgun is assistant professor of international relations at the University of Nottingham’s China Campus in Ningbo, China.

Geoffrey Gordon is a PhD candidate in comparative politics at the University of Virginia. Follow him on Twitter: @geofflgordon.

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Garritt van Dyk, "Commerce, Food, and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England and France" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Garritt van Dyk talks about national identity, food, and cooking in this conversation about Commerce, Food, and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England and France: Across the Channel (Amsterdam University Press, 2022) "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are" was the challenge issued by French gastronomist Jean Brillat-Savarin. Champagne is declared a unique emblem of French sophistication and luxury, linked to the myth of its invention by Dom Pérignon. Across the Channel, a cup of sweet tea is recognized as a quintessentially English icon, simultaneously conjuring images of empire, civility, and relentless rain that demands the sustenance and comfort that only tea can provide. How did these tastes develop in the seventeenth century? Commerce, Food, and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England and France: Across the Channel offers a compelling historical narrative of the relationship between food, national identity, and political economy in the early modern period. These mutually influential relationships are revealed through comparative and transnational analyses of effervescent wine, spices and cookbooks, the development of coffeehouses and cafés, and the 'national sweet tooth' in England and France.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Mark McKinney, "Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics" (Leuven UP, 2021)

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Regarded as the “9th Art”, French bande desinée have a much longer history of serious socio-political engagement than American comics. Since the Algerian War (1954–62), postcolonialism, migration, anti-racism are major themes in francophone comics. Mark McKinney’s newest book studies the genre from the formal dismantling of the French colonial empire in 1962 up to the present. Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics (Leuven UP, 2021) analyses comics representing a gamut of perspectives on immigration and postcolonial ethnic minorities, ranging from staunch defense to violent rejection. Individual chapters are dedicated to specific artists, artistic collectives, comics, or themes, including avant-gardism, undocumented migrants in comics, and racism in far-right comics.

Dr. Mark McKinney is Professor of French at Miami University, Ohio. Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics(Leuven University Press, 2020) is the final installment of a trilogy of sorts that includes The Colonial Heritage of French Comics (Liverpool University Press, 2011) and Redrawing French Empire in Comics (Ohio State University Press, 2013). Dr. McKinney co-edited with Alec G. Hargreaves, Post-Colonial Cultures in France (Routledge, 1997) and edited History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels (University Press of Mississippi, 2008). From 2008-2015, along with Laurence Grove and Ann Miller, he edited the academic journal European Comic Art.

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Noémie Ndiaye, "Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism.

In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques--black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)--in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could/would ultimately live in their midst.

Those scripts were often gendered and hinged on notions of demonization, exclusion, exploitation, animalization, commodification, sexualization, consensual enslavement, misogynoir, infantilization, and evocative association with other racialized minorities. Scripts of Blackness attempts to grasp the stories that Western Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effects of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects.

Daniela Gutiérrez Flores is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish Literature and Cultureat the Univeristy of California, Davis. She is interested in Food Studies, early modern history and literature, Latin American studies, and the history of material culture.

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On Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time"

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The French writer Marcel Proust was fascinated by life. But he was even more interested in how we perceive life. In 1908, when he was in his late 30s, he began to write a novel that explored themes of memory, identity, and the passage of time. This project consumed him until he died in 1922. By the end, his novel came out at more than 1.2 million words—that’s 3,000-4,000 pages depending on the edition. Much of the work was inspired directly from his life, sometimes memories of the past, and sometimes experiences that were unfolding in the present. In English, the novel goes by the title In Search of Lost Time. Although it does have a plot of sorts, this book is more about ideas, and less about a storyline. Elisabeth Ladenson is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and General Editor of Romanic Review at Columbia University. She is the author of Proust’s Lesbianism. Michael Lucey is Professor in the French department at University of California Berkeley. He is the author of What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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On Voltaire's "Candide"

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Many people made the European Enlightenment, but probably nobody better represents the movement’s spirit than the French writer and philosopher Voltaire. He was a man of letters and strong critic of the Catholic Church. In 1759 Voltaire published one of his best known works, Candide. In this satirical fable, Voltaire used current events of the day—like the 7 Years War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake—to explore larger philosophical questions, such as how there could be evil in a world created by a benevolent god. In Candide, Voltaire frees us from the naive optimism that there is a perfect order to things. Carla Hesse is the Peder Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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Sandra Ott, "War, Judgment, And Memory In The Basque Borderlands, 1914-1945" (U Nevada Press, 2008)

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

During the first half of the twentieth century, the French Basque province of Xiberoa was a place of refuge, conflict, and foreign occupation. With the liberation of France in 1944, many Xiberoans faced new conflicts arising from legal and civic judgments made during Vichy and German occupation. War, Judgment, And Memory In The Basque Borderlands, 1914-1945 (U Nevada Press, 2008) traces the roots of their divided memories of the era to local and official interpretations of judgment, behavior, and justice during those troubled times.

In order to understand how the Great War affected the Xiberoan Basques’ perceptions of themselves, Ott contrasts the experiences of people in four different communities located within a fifteen-mile radius. The author also examines how the disruption during the interwar years affected intracommunity relations during the Occupation, the Liberation, and its aftermath. This narrative reveals the diverse ways in which Basques responded to civil war, world war, and displacement, and to one another.

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Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, "Wartime North Africa: A Documentary History, 1934-1950" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein's book Wartime North Africa: A Documentary History, 1934-1950 (Stanford UP, 2022), the first-ever collection of primary documents on North African history and the Holocaust, gives voice to the diversity of those involved--Muslims, Christians, and Jews; women, men, and children; black, brown, and white; the unknown and the notable; locals, refugees, the displaced, and the interned; soldiers, officers, bureaucrats, volunteer fighters, and the forcibly recruited. At times their calls are lofty, full of spiritual lamentation and political outrage. At others, they are humble, yearning for medicine, a cigarette, or a pair of shoes.

Translated from French, Arabic, North African Judeo-Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew, Moroccan Darija, Tamazight (Berber), Italian, and Yiddish, or transcribed from their original English, these writings shed light on how war, occupation, race laws, internment, and Vichy French, Italian fascist, and German Nazi rule were experienced day by day across North Africa. Though some selections are drawn from published books, including memoirs, diaries, and collections of poetry, most have never been published before, nor previously translated into English. These human experiences, combined, make up the history of wartime North Africa.

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Jasmine Calver, "Anti-Fascism, Gender, and International Communism: The Comité Mondial Des Femmes Contre la Guerre et Le Fascisme, 1934-1941" (Routledge, 2022)

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Women played an essential role in the international struggle against fascism during the interwar period, though their work has been neglected in broader historiography. In Anti-Fascism, Gender, and International Communism (Routledge, 2022), Jasmine Calver provides a comprehensive history of the Comité mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme (the International Committee of Women Against War and Fascism, or CMF), an international women's organization concerned with confronting the impact of fascism on women and children across the globe. Examining the CMF's key figures and campaigns during its short 1934-41 tenure, Calver reveals its place at the forefront of global debates about the threat posed by fascism and imperialism. This book explores how the professional women activists and the working-class women who populated the organization developed a committee which advocated for women on a global scale. CMF campaigns around the Spanish Civil War, rising Nazism in Germany, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia show its international ambitions. Using newly-available sources to assess CMF congresses, correspondence, travels, and publications, Calver uncovers the complexities of its links to the Communist International, and its status as an early Popular Front organization. The book comes at an important time to reevaluate the successes and failures of historical efforts to combat rising fascist movements.

Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks.

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Cathy McClive, "The Art of Childbirth: A Seventeenth-Century Midwife's Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant" (Iter Press, 2022)

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Cathy McClive (Florida State University) offers the first full-length bilingual edition of an extraordinary treatise on childbirth written by a seventeenth-century French midwife in The Art of Childbirth: A Seventeenth-Century Midwife's Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant (University of Toronto Press, 2022). In 1671, Marie Baudoin (1625-1700), head midwife and governor of the Hôtel-Dieu of Clermont-Ferrand, sent a treatise on the art of childbirth to her powerful Parisian patron, Dr. Vallant. The story of how Baudoin's knowledge and expertise as a midwife came to be expressed, recorded, and archived raises the question: Was Baudoin exceptional because she was herself extraordinary, or because her voice has reached us through Vallant's careful archival practices? Either way, Baudoin's treatise invites us to reconsider the limits of what we thought we knew midwives "could be and do" in seventeenth-century France. Grounding Marie Baudoin's text in a microanalysis of her life, work, and the Jansenist network between Paris and Clermont-Ferrand, this book connects historiographies of midwifery, Jansenism, hospital administration, public health, knowledge and record-keeping, and women's work, underscoring both Baudoin's capabilities and the archival accidents and intentions behind the preservation of her treatise in a letter.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Burleigh Hendrickson, "Decolonizing 1968: Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Decolonizing 1968: Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar (Cornell UP, 2022) explores how activists in 1968 transformed university campuses across Europe and North Africa into sites of contestation where students, administrators, and state officials collided over definitions of modernity and nationhood after empire.

Burleigh Hendrickson details protesters' versions of events to counterbalance more visible narratives that emerged from state-controlled media centers and ultimately describes how the very education systems put in place to serve the French state during the colonial period ended up functioning as the crucible of postcolonial revolt. Hendrickson not only unearths complex connections among activists and their transnational networks across Tunis, Paris, and Dakar but also weaves together their overlapping stories and participation in France's May '68.

Using global protest to demonstrate the enduring links between France and its former colonies, Decolonizing 1968 traces the historical relationships between colonialism and 1968 activism, examining transnational networks that emerged and new human and immigrants' rights initiatives that directly followed. As a result, Hendrickson reveals that 1968 is not merely a flashpoint in the history of left-wing protest but a key turning point in the history of decolonization.

Thanks to generous funding from Penn State and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories.

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Jonathan R. Hunt, "The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford UP, 2022) reveals how a coalition of powerful and developing states embraced global governance in hopes of a bright and peaceful tomorrow. While fears of nuclear war were ever-present, it was the perceived threat to their preeminence that drove Washington, Moscow, and London to throw their weight behind the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) banishing nuclear testing underground, the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco banning atomic armaments from Latin America, and the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) forbidding more countries from joining the most exclusive club on Earth.

International society, the Cold War, and the imperial U.S. presidency were reformed from 1945 to 1970, when a global nuclear order was inaugurated, averting conflict in the industrial North and yielding what George Orwell styled a "peace that is no peace" everywhere else. Today the nuclear order legitimizes foreign intervention worldwide, empowering the nuclear club and, above all, the United States, to push sanctions and even preventive war against atomic outlaws, all in humanity's name.

Grant Golub is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II.

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Trevor Jackson, "Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) develops a new approach to the history of capitalism and inequality by using the concept of impunity to show how financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters.

Dr. Trevor Jackson examines the legal regulation of capital markets in a period of unprecedented expansion in the complexity of finance ranging from the bankruptcy of Europe's richest man in 1709, to the world's first stock market crash in 1720, to the first Latin American debt crisis in 1825. He shows how, after each crisis, popular anger and improvised policy responses resulted in efforts to create a more just financial capitalism but succeeded only in changing who could act with impunity, and how. Henceforth financial crises came to seem normal and legitimate, caused by impersonal international markets, with the costs borne by domestic populations and nobody in particular at fault.

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On Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth"

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In 1925, on the French occupied island of Martinique, one of the most prominent voices in post colonial theory was born, Frantz Fanon. He was born to parents of both African and French descent, and was brought up in the ways of French culture. For most of Fanon’s life, he identified with French nationality. He even fought for France in WWII. But despite his initial loyalty to France, the French colonizers didn’t see Fanon as equal. In his early adulthood, Fanon began to see colonialism for what it really was. He became a vocal critic of colonialism. In his 1961 text The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote about the psychological effects of colonialism, and the psychological hurdles of decolonization. Manan Ahmed is a historian and associate professor at Columbia University. He is the author of A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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Jennifer Eun-Jung Row, "Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage" (Northwestern UP, 2022)

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In a pathbreaking new book, today’s guest, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row, asks how delay and haste in early modern French theater subverts the temporality of heteronormative politics and sexuality. Professor Row is the author of Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage, published by Northwestern University Press in 2022. A Professor of French at the University of Minnesota, Professor Row serves as the co-chair of the Arts and Design and Humanities Imagine for the project "Dreaming up the Change Disability Makes" and leads the CLA Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop on “Refusing Disposability: Racial and Disability Justice Toward Another World.” Professor Row’s scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities and a Solmsen Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Frans Camphuijsen, "Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Europe: Legal Practice and Communication in the Law Courts of Utrecht, York and Paris" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Frans Camphuijsen explored records from the law courts of York, Paris, and Utrecht and used them as a base for Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Europe: Legal Practice and Communication in the Law Courts of Utrecht, York, and Paris (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). Late medieval societies witnessed the emergence of a particular form of socio-legal practice and logic, focused on the law court and its legal process. In a context of legal pluralism, courts tried to carve out their own position by influencing people's conception of what justice was and how one was supposed to achieve it. These "scripts of justice" took shape through a range of media, including texts, speech, embodied activities and the spaces used to perform all these. Looking beyond traditional historiographical narratives of state building or the professionalization of law, this book argues that the development of law courts was grounded in changing forms of multimedial interaction between those who sought justice and those who claimed to provide it. Through a comparative study of three markedly different types of courts, it involves both local contexts and broader developments in tracing the communication strategies of these late medieval claimants to socio-legal authority.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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On Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish"

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 09:23:00 -0000

We moderns often tell ourselves a story that goes something like this: The past was barbaric, especially when it came to punishing criminals or persecuting minorities. Legal punishment used to include hanging, chopping off a head, burning at the stake, quartering, stoning, drowning, and crushing. Eventually, we tell ourselves, we learned to be more humane. But the 20th century French philosopher Michel Foucault didn’t believe this story modern people told themselves. He didn’t accept that modern punishment was any more humane than it used to be. In his 1975 text Discipline and Punish, Foucault makes his point by tracing the evolution of punishment and power through history. Camille Robcis is associate professor of French and history at Columbia University. She is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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Mary Dunn, "Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In our age of biomedicine, society often treats sickness and disability as problems in need of solution. Phenomena of embodied difference, however, have not always been seen in terms of lack and loss. Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds (Princeton UP, 2022) explores the case of early modern Catholic Canada under French rule and shows it to be a period rich with alternative understandings of infirmity, disease, and death. Counternarratives to our contemporary assumptions, these early modern stories invite us to creatively imagine ways of living meaningfully with embodied difference today.

At the heart of Dunn's account are a range of historical sources: Jesuit stories of illness in New France, an account of Canada's first hospital, the hagiographic vita of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, and tales of miraculous healings wrought by a dead Franciscan friar. In an early modern world that subscribed to a Christian view of salvation, both sickness and disability held significance for more than the body, opening opportunities for virtue, charity, and even redemption. Dunn demonstrates that when these reflections collide with modern thinking, the effect is a certain kind of freedom to reimagine what sickness and disability might mean to us.

Reminding us that the meanings we make of embodied difference are historically conditioned, Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See makes a forceful case for the role of history in broadening our imagination.

Brenna Moore teaches in the Department of Theology at Fordham University and works in the areas of Catholic Intellectual History, particularly in modern Europe.

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Ethnonationalism since 1973: A Discussion with Quinn Slobodian

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

What’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? And what is woke particularism?

John and Elizabeth turn for answers to Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley College and author, most recently, of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.

In a 2019 discussion that proves eerily prescient of politics in 2022, first discuss Jean Raspail‘s racist 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, a book whose popularity in certain quarters since its publication might explain how Europe has gone from Thatcher to Brexit, from Vaclav Havel to Viktor Orban. How is this xenophobic screed related to science fiction of the same period–and to John Locke? Pat Buchanan, American early adapter of Raspail’s hate-mongering, figures prominently.

They then turn to Garrett Hardin’s “Living on a Lifeboat” and John Lanchester’s recent novel The Wall to work out the ideas of forming a society beyond or beneath the state in less obviously racist terms than Raspail’s. What kind of hard choices need to be made in allocating resources? What claims about hard choices are just a screen for the powerful to make choices that, for them, aren’t actually that hard? Does gold make things more or less nationalized?

Finally, in Recallable Books, Quinn recommends Mutant Neoliberalism, edited by William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, for an attempt to really understand the politics of 2016 and beyond; Elizabeth recommends Douglas Holmes’s Economy of Words, an ethnography of central banks; and John recommends Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a novel of solitary solidarity.

Discussed in this episode:

The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail
A Republic, Not an Empire and The Death of the West, Pat Buchanan
Dune, Frank Herbert
“Living on a Lifeboat,” Garrett Hardin
The Lobster Gangs of Maine, James M. Acheson
The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome
Libra, dir. Patty Newman
“Slaveship Earth & the World-Historical Imagination in the Age of Climate Crisis,” Jason W. Moore
The Wall, John Lanchester
Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture, eds. William Callison and Zachary Manfredi
Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks, Douglas R. Holmes
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, Ursula K. Le Guin

Read here: RTB Slobodian

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Michael A. Hunzeker, "Dying to Learn: Wartime Lessons from the Western Front" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Dying to Learn: Wartime Lessons from the Western Front (Cornell UP, 2021), Michael Hunzeker develops a novel theory to explain how wartime militaries learn. He focuses on the Western Front, which witnessed three great-power armies struggle to cope with deadlock throughout the First World War, as the British, French, and German armies all pursued the same solutions-assault tactics, combined arms, and elastic defense in depth. By the end of the war, only the German army managed to develop and implement a set of revolutionary offensive, defensive, and combined arms doctrines that in hindsight represented the best way to fight.

Hunzeker identifies three organizational variables that determine how fighting militaries generate new ideas, distinguish good ones from bad ones, and implement the best of them across the entire organization. These factors are: the degree to which leadership delegates authority on the battlefield; how effectively the organization retains control over soldier and officer training; and whether or not the military possesses an independent doctrinal assessment mechanism.

Through careful study of the British, French, and German experiences in the First World War, Dying to Learn provides a model that shows how a resolute focus on analysis, command, and training can help prepare modern militaries for adapting amidst high-intensity warfare in an age of revolutionary technological change.

Michael A. Hunzeker is Assistant Professor in George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government. Follow him on Twitter @michaelhunzeker

Sam Canter is a policy and strategy analyst, PhD candidate, and Army Reserve intelligence officer. His views are his own and do not reflect any institution, organization, or entity with which he is affiliated.

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On Aimé Césaire's "Discourse on Colonialism"

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Aimé Césaire was born in 1913 on the island of Martinique, which was colonized by the French in the 1600s. He received a scholarship to complete his education in Paris, and by 1935, he’d fallen in with a crowd of brilliant scholars, intellectuals, and activists through his studies. In 1944, Césaire gave a series of lectures in Haiti, inspiring his students to organize a massive strike a few years later. In 1946, he negotiated the transformation of Martinique from a colony of France into a Department of France, which it remains to this day. And in 1950, he wrote Discourse on Colonialism. Many of his earlier writings were directed to those being colonized. This text was specifically for the French. Kaiama Glover is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College of Columbia University. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon and A Regarded Self: “Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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William Doyle, "Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

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Stephen G. Rabe, "The Lost Paratroopers of Normandy: A Story of Resistance, Courage, and Solidarity in a French Village" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The fateful days and weeks surrounding 6 June 1944 have been extensively documented in histories of the Second World War, but less attention has been paid to the tremendous impact of these events on the populations nearby.

The Lost Paratroopers of Normandy: A Story of Resistance, Courage, and Solidarity in a French Village (Cambridge UP, 2022) tells the inspiring yet heartbreaking story of ordinary people who did extraordinary things in defense of liberty and freedom. On D-Day, when transport planes dropped paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions hopelessly off-target into marshy waters in northwestern France, the 900 villagers of Graignes welcomed them with open arms. These villagers - predominantly women - provided food, gathered intelligence, and navigated the floods to retrieve the paratroopers' equipment at great risk to themselves. When the attack by German forces on 11 June forced the overwhelmed paratroopers to withdraw, many made it to safety thanks to the help and resistance of the villagers. In this moving book, historian Stephen G. Rabe, son of one of the paratroopers, meticulously documents the forgotten lives of those who participated in this integral part of D-Day history.

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On Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "The Social Contract"

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that humans are born good, but society corrupts them. He was unimpressed with the fixation on wealth that he saw in the French society. In fact, he felt it was evidence of a self-interested, degenerate society. He endeavored to write the formula for a more civically minded society, and in 1762, he published The Social Contract, a treatise in which he argues that the people should run the government. Harvard Professor James Kloppenberg discusses how Rousseau’s ideas on government and society have inspired thinkers and leaders ever since. James Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University. He is the author of Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition and Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought, among other works. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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4.5 The Best Error You Can Make: Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Baptiste Naudy on Claude McKay

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

What can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation be made legible across the boundaries of language, nation, and history? Renowned scholar and translator Brent Hayes Edwards sits down with publisher and translator Jean-Baptiste Naudy to consider these questions in a wide-ranging discussion about translating the Jamaican American writer Claude McKay. They focus especially on the recent translation into French of McKay’s 1941 Amiable with Big Teeth, which paints a satirical portrait of efforts by 1930s Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia. Brent and Jean-Baptiste consider McKay’s lasting legacy and ongoing revival in the U.S. and France. Translating McKay into French, they note, is a matter of reckoning with France’s own imperial history. That history, along with McKay’s complex understanding of race both in the U.S. and abroad, is illuminated in this conversation about one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most celebrated writers. Be sure to check out this episode’s special bonus material for a dramatic, bilingual reading from Amiable with Big Teeth by Jean-Baptiste!

Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics.

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On Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex"

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In her diary, Simone de Beauvoir once wrote “I did not think of myself as a 'woman.' I was me.” Then, in 1949, de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, laying bare the widely accepted gender inequalities of her time and questioning the idea of man as “universal.” Her book incited both outrage and inspiration, and her ideas were quickly adapted by the Second-wave feminist movement. Although feminist ideas have changed over time, de Beauvoir’s vision of a just and equal society in which men and women respect each other as free and responsible subjects was remarkable for her time. Professor Toril Moi is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Literature at Duke University. She is the author of books such as Revolution of the Ordinary Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell and Sex, Gender, and the Body: The Student Edition of What Is a Woman? See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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Thomas E. Burman et al., "The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650" (U California Press, 2022)

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650 (U California Press, 2022) presents an original and revisionist narrative of the development of the medieval west from late antiquity to the dawn of modernity. This textbook is uniquely centered on the Mediterranean and emphasizes the role played by peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia, and Europe in an age when Christians, Muslims, and Jews of various denominations engaged with each other in both conflict and collaboration.

Key features:

Fifteen-chapter structure to aid classroom use
Sections in each chapter that feature key artifacts relevant to chapter themes
Dynamic visuals, including 190 photos and 20 maps

The Sea in the Middle and its sourcebook companion, Texts from the Middle, pair together to provide a framework and materials that guide students and scholars through this complex but essential history—one that will appeal to the diverse student bodies of today.

Thomas E. Burman is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and the Director of the Medieval Institute. He is a scholar of Christian-Muslim-Jewish intellectual and cultural history in the medieval Mediterranean. His book Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom was awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History.

Brian A. Catlos is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the co-director of the Mediterranean Seminar. He works on Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations in the premodern Mediterranean. His most recent book, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain, is available in eight languages and as an audiobook.

Mark D. Meyerson is Professor in the Department of History and Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He works on Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations in the premodern Mediterranean and on the history of violence. His book A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain was runner-up for the National Jewish Book Award, USA.

Evan Zarkadas (MA) is an independent scholar of European and Medieval history and an educator. He received his master’s in history from the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages.

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Tracy Adams and Christine Adams, "The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry" (Penn State UP, 2020)

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Kings throughout medieval and early modern Europe had extraconjugal sexual partners. Only in France, however, did the royal mistress become a quasi-institutionalized political position. This study explores the emergence and development of the position of French royal mistress through detailed portraits of nine of its most significant incumbents: Agnès Sorel, Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, Diane de Poitiers, Gabrielle d’Estrées, Françoise Louise de La Baume Le Blanc, Françoise Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, Françoise d’Aubigné, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, and Jeanne Bécu.

Beginning in the fifteenth century, key structures converged to create a space at court for the royal mistress. The first was an idea of gender already in place: that while women were legally inferior to men, they were men’s equals in competence. Because of their legal subordinacy, queens were considered to be the safest regents for their husbands, and, subsequently, the royal mistress was the surest counterpoint to the royal favorite. Second, the Renaissance was a period during which people began to experience space as theatrical. This shift to a theatrical world opened up new ways of imagining political guile, which came to be positively associated with the royal mistress. Still, the role had to be activated by an intelligent, charismatic woman associated with a king who sought women as advisors. The fascinating particulars of each case are covered in the chapters of Tracy Adams and Christine Adams's book The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnes Sorel to Madame DuBarry (Penn State University Press, 2021).

Thoroughly researched and compellingly narrated, this important study explains why the tradition of a politically powerful royal mistress materialized at the French court, but nowhere else in Europe. It will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the French monarchy, women and royalty, and gender studies.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, "The Abbe Gregoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism" (U California Press, 2021)

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this age of globalization, the eighteenth-century priest and abolitionist Henri Grégoire have often been called a man ahead of his time. An icon of anti-racism, a hero to people from Ho Chi Minh to French Jews, Grégoire has been particularly celebrated since 1989, when the French government placed him in the Pantheon as a model of ideals of universalism and human rights.

In The Abbe Gregoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (U California Press, 2021), we gain access for the first time to the full complexity of Grégoire's intellectual and political universe and the compelling nature of his persona. His life offers an extraordinary vantage from which to view significant issues in European and world history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It provides provocative insights into many of the twenty-first century's prevailing tensions, ideals, and paradoxes. Focusing on Grégoire's idea of "regeneration," that people could literally be made anew, Sepinwall argues that revolutionary universalism was more complicated than it appeared. Tracing the Revolution's long-term legacy, she suggests that while it spread concepts of equality and liberation throughout the world, its ideals also helped to justify colonialism and conquest.

Dr. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall is a Professor of History at California State University – San Marcos and a French and Haitian history specialist. Brigid Wallace a Graduate Student of History @Lehigh University.

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Robyn D'Avignon, "A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa" (Duke UP, 2022)

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (Duke University Press, 2022), Robyn d’Avignon, Assistant Professor of History at NYU, retraces the history of gold mining and orpaillage along the geological formation known as the West African Birimian Greenstone Belt. D’Avignon proposes the expression “ritual geology” to refer to “a set of practices, prohibitions, and cosmological engagements with the earth”, which has both endured until today among local miners and evolved since its first traces dating back to the 9th century. More than an effort to recover a legacy of knowledge about the subterranean, which has been virtually erased during the colonial period and subsequently criminalized, A Ritual Geology addresses the challenges currently being faced by local communities due to the conquering presence of corporate mining in the region. By situating the present situation within the rich history of this transnational “ritual geology”, d’Avignon’s book does not only provide a new vista from which to consider the history of West Africa, but also contribute to the urgent problem of imagining equitable ways of redistributing geological and other non-renewable resources.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

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Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla, "Africa's Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story" (Pluto Press, 2021)

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Colonialism persists in many African countries due to the continuation of imperial monetary policy. Africa's Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story (Pluto Press, 2021) by Fanny Pigeaud and Dr. Ndongo Samba Sylla is the little-known account of the CFA Franc and economic imperialism.

The CFA Franc was created in 1945, binding fourteen African states and split into two monetary zones. Why did French colonial authorities create it and how does it work? Why was independence not extended to monetary sovereignty for former French colonies? Through an exploration of the genesis of the currency and an examination of how the economic system works, the authors seek to answer these questions and more.

As protests against the colonial currency grow, the need for myth-busting on the CFA Franc is vital and this exposé of colonial infrastructure proves that decolonisation is unfinished business.

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F. R. Scott’s Journal of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Greg Marchildon interviews Graham Fraser who edited F. R. Scott’s journal that he kept while he was a member of the Royal Commission on Bilinguiism and Biculturalism–the famous Bi and Bi Commission. The book is entitled The Fate of Canada: F. R. Scott’s Journal of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 1963-1971 (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2021). The journal sheds considerable light on the intellectual journey of the Commission and the content of its interim and final reports. Graham Fraser is a former journalist who served as Canada’s sixth Commissioner of Official Languages between 2006 and 2016. He was also a writer who has published in both official languages of Canada. An officer of the Order of Canada, he is currently associated with the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. This podcast was produced by Jessica Schmidt.

This interview was produced with the support of The Champlain Society. The mission of The Champlain Society is to increase public awareness of, and accessibility to, Canada’s rich store of historical records.

Gregory P. Marchildon is the Ontario Research Chair in Health Policy and System Design with the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto.

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Ian Macpherson McCulloch, "John Bradstreet's Raid 1758: A Riverine Operation in the French and Indian War" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

A year after John Bradstreet’s raid of 1758—the first and largest British-American riverine raid mounted during the Seven Years’ War (known in North America as the French and Indian War)—Benjamin Franklin hailed it as one of the great “American” victories of the war. Bradstreet heartily agreed, and soon enough, his own official account was adopted by Francis Parkman and other early historians.

In John Bradstreet's Raid 1758: A Riverine Operation in the French and Indian War (U Oklahoma Press, 2022), Ian Macpherson McCulloch uses never-before-seen materials and a new interpretive approach to dispel many of the myths that have grown up around the operation. The result is a closely observed, deeply researched revisionist microhistory—the first unvarnished, balanced account of a critical moment in early American military history.

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Christopher Goscha, "The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Vietnamese victory over the French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which ended almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina, is one of the most famous events in the history of anticolonialism. How were the Vietnamese communists able to achieve this remarkable victory over a much more powerful colonial force? This is the question Chris Goscha seeks to answer in his new book, The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam (Princeton UP, 2022). In doing so, Goscha re-enters the vexed debate about the relative importance of nationalism and communism in Vietnam’s struggle against foreign powers. And he puts forward a compelling argument about the importance of “war communism” to the Vietnamese victory over the French.

Chris Goscha is Professor of History and International Relations at the University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada, and a prize-winning author of works on the modern history of Vietnam.

Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au.

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Emily Joan Ward, "Royal Childhood and Child Kingship: Boy Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, c. 1050–1262" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Royal Childhood and Child Kingship: Boy Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, c. 1050–1262 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) refines adult-focused perspectives on medieval rulership. Dr. Emily Joan Ward exposes the problematic nature of working from the assumption that kingship equated to adult power. Children's participation and political assent could be important facets of the day-to-day activities of rule, as this study shows through an examination of royal charters, oaths to young boys, cross-kingdom diplomacy and coronation.

The first comparative and thematic study of child rulership in this period, Dr. Ward analyses eight case studies across northwestern Europe from c.1050 to c.1250. Dr. Ward stresses innovations and adaptations in royal government, questions the exaggeration of political disorder under a boy king, and suggests a ruler's childhood posed far less of a challenge than their adolescence and youth.

Uniting social, cultural and political historical methodologies, Dr. Ward unveils how wider societal changes between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries altered children's lived experiences of royal rule and modified how people thought about child kingship.

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On Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables"

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Over 150 years later, Les Miserables is a story that still resonates with readers and audiences around the world. The story highlighted the unjust social class system of 19th century France by moving the underrepresented lives of the poor and miserable to center stage. But this wasn’t something unique to France. It was, and still is, a global issue. Victor Hugo knew this story had worldwide relevance and he wanted it to be accessible to all readers. Professor David Bellos is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is a well-known translator and author of the translation studies text Is That A Fish in Your Ear? His teaching interests include modern and contemporary European fiction and translation studies. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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Charles Devellenes, "Positive Atheism: Bayle, Meslier, D'Holbach, Diderot" (Edinburgh UP, 2021)

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Positive Atheism: Bayle, Meslier, d’Holbach, Diderot (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Dr. Charles Devellennes looks at the religious, social, and political thought of the first four thinkers of the French Enlightenment: Pierre Bayle, Jean Meslier, Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach and Denis Diderot to explicitly argue for atheism as a positive philosophy. He shows how atheism evolved considerably over the century that spans the works of these four authors: from the possibility of the virtuous atheist in the late 17th century, to a deeply rooted materialist philosophy with radical social and political consequences by the eve of the French revolution. The metamorphosis of atheism from a purely negative phenomenon to one that became self-aware had profound consequences for establishing an ethics without God and the rise of republicanism as a political philosophy.

Charles Devellennes is a Senior Lecturer in Political and Social Thought at University of Kent’s School of Politics and International Relations. His research interests lie in the interdisciplinary area of the history of political thought, specifically with eighteenth century political thought in the field of religion and politics, and the rise of atheism in France at this time.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. @carrielynnland carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca

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Thomas Dodman, "What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 19:00:00 -0000

Feelings have a history and nostalgia has its own. In What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion(University of Chicago Press, 2018) Thomas Dodman explores the history of nostalgia from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. Beginning with the coining of the term by a young Swiss medical student in 1688, the book tracks the development of nostalgia as a diagnosis with a specific military medical history. Never exclusive to the French context, the disease garnered more attention there than elsewhere in Europe for various reasons, including the existence of a powerful military force through the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and the specificities of French political, cultural, and medical fields during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rooted at first in the experiences, displacements, and alienation of soldiers far from home, the diagnosis morphed eventually from an illness to a broader set of cultural phenomena and “feels,” acquiring the character of the temporal, memorial sentimentality we think of today.

Bringing together intellectual, military, and medical history with the history of emotions, What Nostalgia Was stays close throughout to the lived experience of those whose pained and/or pleasurable longings for spaces/times distant or lost preoccupied the expert observers and practitioners who sought to help and understand them. Dodman’s examination of historical shifts in understandings of nostalgia is compelling as it builds on both the author’s commitment to archival evidence and sources, and his openness to the insights and approaches of political and cultural theory, philosophy and literary studies. His carefully researched analysis of what nostalgia was and became between Algeria and France is particularly fascinating. The book will give readers (and listeners!) much to think on in terms of why and how nostalgia has moved and affected individuals and cultures for centuries up to and including the present.

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Olivier Zunz, "The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In 1831, at the age of twenty-five, Alexis de Tocqueville made his fateful journey to America, where he observed the thrilling reality of a functioning democracy. From that moment onward, the French aristocrat would dedicate his life as a writer and politician to ending despotism in his country and bringing it into a new age. In this authoritative and groundbreaking biography, leading Tocqueville expert Olivier Zunz tells the story of a radical thinker who, uniquely charged by the events of his time, both in America and France, used the world as a laboratory for his political ideas.

Placing Tocqueville's dedication to achieving a new kind of democracy at the center of his life and work, Zunz traces Tocqueville's evolution into a passionate student and practitioner of liberal politics across a trove of correspondence with intellectuals, politicians, constituents, family members, and friends. While taking seriously Tocqueville's attempts to apply the lessons of Democracy in America to French politics, Zunz shows that the United States, and not only France, remained central to Tocqueville's thought and actions throughout his life. In his final years, with France gripped by an authoritarian regime and America divided by slavery, Tocqueville feared that the democratic experiment might be failing. Yet his passion for democracy never weakened.

Giving equal attention to the French and American sources of Tocqueville's unique blend of political philosophy and political action, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville (Princeton UP, 2022) offers the richest, most nuanced portrait yet of a man who, born between the worlds of aristocracy and democracy, fought tirelessly for the only system that he believed could provide both liberty and equality.

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Máté Rigó, "Capitalism in Chaos: How the Business Elites of Europe Prospered in the Era of the Great War" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Capitalism in Chaos: How the Business Elites of Europe Prospered in the Era of the Great War (Cornell UP, 2022) explores an often-overlooked consequence and paradox of the First World War—the prosperity of business elites and bankers in service of the war effort during the destruction of capital and wealth by belligerent armies. This study of business life amid war and massive geopolitical changes follows industrialists and policymakers in Central Europe as the region became crucially important for German and subsequently French plans of economic and geopolitical expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on extensive research in sixteen archives, five languages, and four states, Máté Rigó demonstrates that wartime destruction and the birth of "war millionaires" were two sides of the same coin. Despite the recent centenaries of the Great War and the Versailles peace treaties, knowledge of the overall impact of war and border changes on business life remains sporadic, based on scant statistics and misleading national foci. Consequently, most histories remain wedded to the viewpoint of national governments and commercial connections across national borders. Capitalism in Chaos changes the static historical perspective by presenting Europe's East as the economic engine of the continent.

Rigó accomplishes this paradigm shift by focusing on both supranational regions—including East-Central and Western Europe—as well as the eastern and western peripheries of Central Europe, Alsace-Lorraine and Transylvania, from the 1870s until the 1920s. As a result, Capitalism in Chaos offers a concrete, lively history of economics during major world crises, with a contemporary consciousness toward inequality and disparity during a time of collapse.

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On Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions"

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Jean-Jacques Rousseau led an interesting life. He was a philosopher, writer, and music composer in the 18th century. Rousseau believed that society has an enormous influence on human development and behavior. In his later years, he wrote a detailed account of his life to help explain how his own experiences shaped his personality, views, neuroses, and imperfections. This autobiography was called Confessions. Professor David Avrom Bell is a professor of History at Princeton University. He focuses on early modern and modern Europe and is the author of Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution, as well as six other books. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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Carl A. Brasseaux and Donald W. Davis, "Asian-Cajun Fusion: Shrimp from the Bay to the Bayou" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Shrimp is easily America’s favorite seafood, but its very popularity is the wellspring of problems that threaten the shrimp industry’s existence. Asian-Cajun Fusion: Shrimp from the Bay to the Bayou (University of Mississippi Press, 2022) by Carl A. Brasseaux and Donald W. Davis provides insightful analysis of this paradox and a detailed, thorough history of the industry in Louisiana.

Dried shrimp technology was part of the cultural heritage Pearl River Chinese immigrants introduced into the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century. As early as 1870, Chinese natives built shrimp-drying operations in Louisiana’s wetlands and exported the product to Asia through the port of San Francisco. This trade internationalized the shrimp industry. About three years before Louisiana’s Chinese community began their export endeavors, manufactured ice became available in New Orleans, and the Dunbar family introduced patented canning technology. The convergence of these ancient and modern technologies shaped the evolution of the northern Gulf Coast’s shrimp industry to the present.

Coastal Louisiana’s historic connection to the Pacific Rim endures. Not only does the region continue to export dried shrimp to Asian markets domestically and internationally, but since 2000 the region’s large Vietnamese immigrant population has increasingly dominated Louisiana’s fresh shrimp harvest. Louisiana shrimp constitute the American gold standard of raw seafood excellence. Yet, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, cheap imports are forcing the nation’s domestic shrimp industry to rediscover its economic roots. “Fresh off the boat” signs and real-time internet connections with active trawlers are reestablishing the industry’s ties to local consumers. Direct marketing has opened the industry to middle-class customers who meet the boats at the docks. This “right off the boat” paradigm appears to be leading the way to reestablishment of sustainable aquatic resources. All-one-can-eat shrimp buffets are not going to disappear, but the Louisiana shrimp industry’s fate will ultimately be determined by discerning consumers’ palates.

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Joanne Watson, "Empress Eugenie: A Footnote History, 1826-1920" (Grosvenor House, 2022)

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Empress Eugenie: A Footnote History, 1826-1920 (Grosvenor House, 2022) is the story of the glamorous French Empress who escaped from a vengeful mob in 1870 and spent the next fifty years in exile in England. With a broad brush approach to the political events, it shows her life and times from a different angle, exploring subjects often relegated to mere footnotes. Aided by the increased digitalization of sources which produced many new and interesting discoveries, the book features 53 images of important people and places.

Eugenie was born in a makeshift tent during an earthquake in Southern Spain but this impetuous and beautiful young woman's life changed dramatically when she married Napoleon III in 1853. She was to become a worldwide fashion icon but was much more than a trophy wife even though she suffered from a philandering husband. An early feminist with a social conscience, her achievements were negated by many because she wasn't French, becoming the inevitable scapegoat for the ills of the Empire. Yet in November 1869 when Eugenie opened the Suez Canal she was the most famous woman in the world. Less than a year later she made a dramatic escape from those who blamed her for a disastrous war that caused the collapse of the Second Empire. Helped by her American dentist, Eugenie was smuggled out of Paris en route to England and exile. The early death of her husband was followed a few years later by that of her son whilst with the British army in South Africa.

A close friend of Queen Victoria, Eugenie lived in Farnborough, a small Hampshire town for 4 decades, building an Imperial Mausoleum for her husband and son and dressing in black for the rest of her days. Condemned in her own mind to live for a hundred years she then recovered her zest for life. Always keen to move with the times she embraced new technology, traveled extensively, and maintained her links with the European royal circle whilst becoming a familiar and much-respected figure in her neighborhood. Eugenie remained remarkably loyal to France and never relinquished her sense of duty, giving up part of her home to be an army hospital during World War 1.

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Elizabeth Andrews Bond, "The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Inspired by the reading and writing habits of citizens leading up to the French Revolution, The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France (Cornell UP, 2021) is a compelling addition to the long-running debate about the link between the Enlightenment and the political struggle that followed. Dr. Elizabeth Andrews Bond diligently scoured France's local newspapers spanning the two decades prior to the Revolution as well as its first three years shining a light on the letters to the editor. The Writing Public is a history of the thousands of readers and writers who participated in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution by writing to their local newspapers. A form of early social media, these letters constituted a lively and ongoing conversation among readers.

Bond takes us beyond the glamorous salons of the intelligentsia into the everyday worlds of the craftsmen, clergy, farmers, and women who composed these letters. As a result, we get a fascinating glimpse into who participated in public discourse, what they most wanted to discuss, and how they shaped a climate of opinion.

The Writing Public offers a novel examination of how French citizens used the information press to form norms of civic discourse and shape the experience of revolution. The result is a nuanced analysis of knowledge production during the Enlightenment.

The Writing Public won the David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies.

Dr. Elizabeth Andrews Bond is an associate professor of History at The Ohio State University. She is a specialist in the history of print and public opinion, the social history of ideas, the cultural history of the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.

Brigid Wallace is a Graduate Student in the History Department at Lehigh University. (Twitter: @faithismine51)

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Josep M. Fradera, "The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires" (Princeton UP, 2018)

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

How the legacy of monarchical empires shaped Britain, France, Spain, and the United States as they became liberal entities? Historians view the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a turning point when imperial monarchies collapsed and modern nations emerged. Treating this pivotal moment as a bridge rather than a break, Josep Fradera's The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires (Princeton University Press, 2018) offers a sweeping examination of four of these modern powers—Great Britain, France, Spain, and the United States—and asks how, after the great revolutionary cycle in Europe and America, the history of monarchical empires shaped these new nations. Fradera explores this transition, paying particular attention to the relations between imperial centers and their sovereign territories and the constant and changing distinctions placed between citizens and subjects.

The book argues that the essential struggle that lasted from the Seven Years’ War to the twentieth century was over the governance of dispersed and varied peoples: each empire tried to ensure domination through subordinate representation or by denying any representation at all. The most common approach echoed Napoleon’s “special laws,” which allowed France to reinstate slavery in its Caribbean possessions. The Spanish and Portuguese constitutions adopted “specialness” in the 1830s; the United States used comparable guidelines to distinguish between states, territories, and Indian reservations; and the British similarly ruled their dominions and colonies. In all these empires, the mix of indigenous peoples, European-origin populations, slaves and indentured workers, immigrants, and unassimilated social groups led to unequal and hierarchical political relations. Fradera considers not only political and constitutional transformations but also their social underpinnings. Presenting a fresh perspective on the ways in which nations descended and evolved from and throughout empires, The Imperial Nation highlights the ramifications of this entangled history for the subjects who lived in its shadows.

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

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Paul A. Silverstein, "Postcolonial France: The Question of Race and the Future of the Republic" (Pluto Press, 2018)

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

France is a bellwether for the postcolonial anxieties and populist politics emerging across the world today. Postcolonial France: The Question of Race and the Future of the Republic (Pluto Press, 2018) explores the dynamics and dilemmas of the present moment of crisis and hope in France, through an exploration of recent moral panics.

Taking stock of the tensions as they have emerged over the last quarter of a century, Paul Silverstein looks at urban racial violence, female Islamic dress and male public prayer, anti-system gangster rap, and sporting performances in and around which debates over France's multicultural future have arisen. It traces these conflicts to the unresolved tensions of an imperial project, the present-day effects of which are still felt by many.

Despite the barriers, which include neo-nationalist racism and Islamophobia, French citizens of various backgrounds have found ways to build flourishing lives. Silverstein shows how they have responded to urban marginalisation, police violence and institutional discrimination in remarkably creative ways.

Paul Silverstein is Professor of Anthropology at Reed College, USA. He is author of Postcolonial France (Pluto, 2018) and Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race and Nation (Indiana UP, 2004). He writes on identity politics, postcoloniality, and diasporic popular culture in France and North Africa.

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On "Encyclopédie"

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

One of the earliest modern encyclopedias was printed in France in the 18th century. Unlike many encyclopedias that came before it, this text was written in French instead of Latin, which was the language of the elite. Its authors aimed to compile all the knowledge in the world. They were also trying to disseminate that knowledge to the general public. James Engell is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He has directed dissertations in American Studies and Romance Languages and Literature (French) and is author of The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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Meighen McCrae, "Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War: The Supreme War Council and War Planning, 1917-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

When the Germans requested an armistice in October 1918, it was a shock to the Allied political and military leadership. They had been expecting, and planning for, the war to continue into 1919, the year they hoped to achieve a complete military victory over the Central Powers.

In Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War: The Supreme War Council and War Planning, 1917-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2019), Meighen McCrae illuminates how, throughout this planning process, the Supreme War Council evolved to become the predominant mechanism for coalition war-making. She analyses the Council's role in the formulation of an Allied strategy for 1918-1919 across the various theatres of war and compares the perspectives of the British, French, Americans and Italians. In doing so we learn how, in an early example of modern alliance warfare, the Supreme War Council had to coordinate national needs with coalition ones.

Alex Beckstrand is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Connecticut, an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves, and works in the aerospace industry. Email: alex.beckstrand@uconn.edu Twitter: @AlexBeckstrand.

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Philipp Felsch, "The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960-1990" (Polity Press, 2021)

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

'Theory' - a magical glow has emanated from this word since the sixties. Theory was more than just a succession of ideas: it was an article of faith, a claim to truth, a lifestyle. It spread among its adherents in cheap paperbacks and triggered heated debates in seminar rooms and cafés. The Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Adorno, Derrida, Foucault: these and others were the exotic schools and thinkers whose ideas were being devoured by young minds. But where did the fascination for dangerous thoughts come from?

In The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960-1990 (Polity Press, 2021), Philipp Felsch follows the hopes and dreams of a generation that entered the jungle of difficult texts. His setting is West Germany in the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s: in a world frozen in the Cold War, movement only came from big ideas. It was the time of apocalyptic master thinkers, upsetting reading experiences and glamorous incomprehensibility. As the German publisher Suhrkamp published Adorno's Minima Moralia and other High Theory works of the Frankfurt School, a small publisher in West Berlin, Merve Verlag, provided readers with a steady stream of the subversive new theory coming out of France.

By following the adventures of the publishers who provided the books and the reading communities that consumed and debated them, Philipp Felsch tells the remarkable story of an intellectual revolt when the German Left fell in love with Theory.

Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades.

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Amy Edwards, "Are We Rich Yet?: The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain" (U California Press, 2022)

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this podcast, Amy Edwards, author of Are We Rich Yet?: The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain (U California Press, 2022), provides a fascinating journey into her own research and how she built a picture of a key moment of the 20th century. As a result, she brings together different strands of work such as cultural, business, economic and financial history. The book and podcast will be of interest to anyone old enough to remember the 1980s or whose current life has been shaped by that decade.

References to other works discussed in the podcast:

Allon, Fiona. 2014. "The Feminisation of Finance", Australian Feminist Studies, 29:79, 12-30, DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2014.901279

Chatelain, Marcia. 2020. Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Liverlight. NBN Interview by Amanda Joyce here.

Effosse, Sabine. 2021. “Financial Empowerment for Married Women in France.” Quaderni Storici 166: 117-141. doi: 10.1408/101558

Martínez-Rodríguez, Susana (2022). “DIANA (1969-1978): The First Women´s Finance Magazine in Spain” Feminist Media Studies (early view). NBN Interview by Paula de la Cruz here.

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The Future of the European Union: A Discussion with Luuk van Middelaar

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Brexit debate has been so all-consuming and filled with so much misinformation that many Brits and others can overlook some the challenges facing the European Union itself. Looked at in broad terms, it has been an astonishingly successful political project, having delivered 70 years of peace and prosperity. But what lies ahead? What issues does it need to tackle to maintain that kind of success? Luuk van Middelaar is a Dutch historian, Professor of EU law at Leiden University. He has worked at the heart of EU institutions and give his observations and analysis of the underlying tensions in the EU and what lies ahead.

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Carolyn J. Eichner, "Feminism's Empire" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

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Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, "Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie" (Companyédition PUF/Disclose, 2021)

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

What happens when you bring together an important collection of previously secret archival documents dealing with France's nuclear detonations in the Pacific from 1966 to 1996, a nuclear scientist, and an investigative journalist? Working together beginning in early 2020, Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, the authors of Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie (Presses universitaires de France and Disclose, 2021) have now shared with readers the meaningful and provocative results of just such a collaboration. Revisiting the history of France's nuclear weapons program over a period of three decades (following an initial set of atmospheric and underground detonations in the Algerian Sahara from 1960 to 1966), Toxique is a scientific and journalistic interrogation of the immediate and long-term health and environmental effects of the 193 bombs the French military exploded in the region, exposing civilians, as well as French military and other personnel to the fallout and radiation emitted by these explosions.

The significance of this interdisciplinary investigation cannot be overstated. As Toxique shows, these nuclear detonations continue to have harmful effects on the everyday lives of thousands of local residents, along with those veterans who served in the area. As Philippe and Statius have shown, the toxicity of these nuclear blasts has been consistently underestimated and misrepresented by the French military and state. Holding important implications for the victims of these detonations in terms of both recognition and financial compensation, the book and its accompanying online platform, Moruroa Files, have made a huge impact. I was thrilled to have the chance to speak with these remarkable researchers and writers and hope listeners will learn from and enjoy our conversation. The more people within and beyond the field of French Studies who are aware of this damaging past and present, the better.

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Itay Lotem, "The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)

Fri, 05 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), Itay Lotem explores the remembering of empire in Britain and France. By comparing these two former colonial powers, the author tells two distinct stories about coming to terms with the legacies of colonialism, the role of silence and the breaking thereof. Focusing on memory as an ongoing, politicized public debate, the book examines the afterlife of colonial history as an element of political and social discourse that depends on actors’ goals and priorities.

Itay Lotem earned his Ph.D at the University of London, Queen Mary and is currently a senior lecturer in French Studies at the University of Westminster.

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Nina Rattner Gelbart, "Minerva's French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France" (Yale UP, 2021)

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France (Yale University Press, 2021), Nina Gelbart, Professor of History and Anita Johnson Wand Professor of Women’s Studies at Occidental College, shares the stories of six, incredibly resourceful, and dedicated women who contributed substantially to the sciences of their time. While offering valuable comments on the challenges of writing gender-inclusive histories of science, the book restores the legacies of the mathematician Elisabeth Ferrand, the astronomer Nicole Reine Lepaute, the botanists Jeanne Barret and Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, the anatomist Marie-Marguerite Bihéron, and the chemist Marie Geneviève Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville. Minerva’s French Sisters also reads as the personal journey of an historian looking for lost evidence and piecing together traces to offer a unique vision of the Enlightenment sciences through the lens of these women.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

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Emily O. Wittman, "Interwar Itineraries: Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing" (Amherst College Press, 2022)

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 07:00:00 -0000

How people traveled, and how people wrote about travel, changed in the interwar years. Novel technologies eased travel conditions, breeding new iterations of the colonizing gaze. The sense that another war was coming lent urgency and anxiety to the search for new places and "authentic" experiences. In Interwar Itineraries: Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing (Amherst College Press, 2022), Emily O. Wittman identifies a diverse group of writers from two languages who embarked on such quests. For these writers, authenticity was achieved through rugged adventure abroad to economically poorer destinations. Using translation theory and new approaches in travel studies and global modernisms, Wittman links and complicates the symbolic and rhetorical strategies of writers including André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Michel Leiris, Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, among others, that offer insight into the high ethical stakes of travel and allow us to see in new ways how models of the authentic self are built and maintained through asymmetries of encounter.

This book is available open-access here.

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On Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days"

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

When French author Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days in the late 1800s, scheduled global travel was practically science fiction, and 80 days seemed impossibly fast. But his techno-futurist novel inspired everyday adventurers to traverse the globe by boat, train, bike, and foot—and beat his protagonist’s record. Harvard professor Joyce Chaplin discusses what we can learn from Jules Verne’s classic novel. Joyce Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. She is the author of Round About The Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm.

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Michael K. Beauchamp, "Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815" (LSU Press, 2021)

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

M. K. Beauchamp's Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815 (LSU Press, 2021) examines the challenges that resulted from U.S. territorial expansion through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. With the acquisition of this vast region, the United States gained a colonial European population whose birthplace, language, and religion often differed from those of their U.S. counterparts. This population exhibited multiple ethnic tensions and possessed little experience with republican government. Consequently, administration of the territory proved a trial-and-error endeavor involving incremental cooperation between federal officials and local elites. As Beauchamp demonstrates, this process of gradual accommodation served as an essential nationalizing experience for the people of Louisiana.

After the acquisition, federal officials who doubted the loyalty of the local French population and their capacity for self-governance denied the territory of Orleans--easily the region's most populated and economically robust area--a quick path to statehood. Instead, U.S. officials looked to groups including free people of color, Native Americans, and recent immigrants, all of whom found themselves ideally placed to negotiate for greater privileges from the new territorial government. Beauchamp argues that U.S. administrators, despite claims of impartiality and equality before the law, regularly acted as fickle agents of imperial power and frequently co-opted local elites with prominent positions within the parishes. Overall, the methods utilized by the United States in governing Louisiana shared much in common with European colonial practices implemented elsewhere in North America during the early nineteenth century.

While historians have previously focused on Washington policy makers in investigating the relationship between the United States and the newly acquired territory, Beauchamp emphasizes the integral role played by territorial elites who wielded enormous power and enabled government to function. His work offers profound insights into the interplay of class, ethnicity, and race, as well as an understanding of colonialism, the nature of republics, democracy, and empire. By placing the territorial period of early national Louisiana in an imperial context, this study reshapes perceptions of American expansion and manifest destiny in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Instruments of Empire serves as a rich resource for specialists studying Louisiana and the U.S. South, as well as scholars of slavery and free people of color, nineteenth-century American history, Atlantic World and border studies, U.S. foreign relations, and the history of colonialism and empire.

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Skye Cleary, "How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment" (St. Martin's Press, 2022)

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Skye C. Cleary is a philosopher, writer and university teacher. In her new book How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) offers an introduction to Beauvoir’s thinking about authenticity and how experience and situation shape the people we become. For Beauvoir, as an existential philosopher, we first exist and spend our lives not uncovering who we are but constructing our identity. Authenticity is the pursuit of self-creation and self-renewal. Under patriarchy women receive a set of myths that stand in the way of taking responsibility for our freedom. Through the experiences and the milestones of friendship, love, marriage, children and confronting death we have opportunity to choose who we will become. Because we live in interdependence with others, Beauvoir’s philosophy of the self and genuine living allows others to also achieve freedom in self-creation through reciprocity. Cleary has given us a lively written book drawing not only from Beauvoir’s life but her own experience in self-creation.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the cultural and intellectual history of women and the origins of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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Christina B. Carroll, "The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, 1850–1900" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, 1850–1900 (Cornell University Press, 2022), Dr. Christina Carroll highlights the connections between domestic political struggles and overseas imperial structures. She explains how and why French Republicans embraced colonial conquest as a central part of their political platform. The book explores the meaning and value of empire in late-nineteenth-century France, arguing that ongoing disputes about the French state's political organization intersected with racialized beliefs about European superiority over colonial others in French imperial thought.

For much of this period, French writers and politicians did not always differentiate between continental and colonial empire. By employing a range of sources—from newspapers and pamphlets to textbooks and novels—Dr. Carroll demonstrates that the memory of older continental imperial models shaped French understandings of, and justifications for, their new colonial empire. She shows that the slow identification of the two types of empire emerged due to a politicized campaign led by colonial advocates who sought to defend overseas expansion against their opponents. This new model of colonial empire was shaped by a complicated set of influences, including political conflict, the legacy of both Napoleons, international competition, racial science, and French experiences in the colonies.

The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, 1850–1900 skillfully weaves together knowledge from its wide-ranging source base to articulate how the meaning and history of empire became deeply intertwined with the meaning and history of the French nation.

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Karen Offen, "Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

While it is an overused cliché, France is indeed a land of contrasts, famous for its paradoxes. In French political history, the most startling may be the progressive policies of the Third Republic (1870-1940) on just about everything except for gender. Despite its embrace of the spirit of 1789, universal manhood suffrage, and secularism, the republic deemed French women second class citizens. Indeed, French women did not get the vote until the Fourth Republic in 1944, a full generation after almost every nation-state in the global north. Karen Offen has written an encyclopedic history of French debates about the soi-dissant “Woman Question”. While Dr. Offen’s Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), was the focus of our discussion, we also touched on its companion book, The Woman Question in France, 1400-1870 (Cambridge UP, 2017).

Karen Offen earned her Ph.D. at Stanford University. She is currently a historian and independent scholar, affiliated as a Senior Scholar with the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University. Dr. Offen publishes on the history of Modern Europe, especially France and its global influence; Western thought and politics with reference to family, gender, and the relative status of women; historiography; women's history; national, regional and global histories of feminism; comparative history, and the politics of knowledge. She has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for study and research, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Lilianne Milgrom, "L' Origine: The Secret Life of the World's Most Erotic Masterpiece" (Girl Friday Books, 2021)

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Lilianne Milgrom about L' Origine: The Secret Life of the World's Most Erotic Masterpiece (Girl Friday Books, 2021).

In 1866, maverick French artist Gustave Courbet painted one of the most iconic images in the history of art: a sexually explicit portrait of a woman's exposed genitals. Audaciously titled L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), the scandalous painting was kept hidden for a century and a half. Today, it hangs in the world-renowned Orsay Museum in Paris, viewed by millions of visitors a year.

As the first artist authorized by the Orsay Museum to re-create Courbet's The Origin of the World, author Lilianne Milgrom was thrust into the painting's intimate orbit, spending six weeks replicating every fold, crevice, and pubic hair. The experience inspired her to share her story and the painting's riveting clandestine history with readers beyond the confines of the art world.

Pallavi Joshi is a PhD Candidate in French Studies at the University of Warwick.

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Geoffrey Kurtz, "Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social Democracy" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2014)

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Jean Jaurès was a towering intellectual and political leader of the democratic Left at the turn of the twentieth century, but he is little remembered today outside of France, and his contributions to political thought are little studied anywhere. In Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social Democracy (Penn State University Press, 2016), Geoffrey Kurtz introduces Jaurès to an American audience.

Geoffrey Kurtz is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020).

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Virginia Reinburg, "Storied Places: Pilgrim Shrines, Nature, and History in Early Modern France" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Virginia Reinburg about her book Storied Places: Pilgrim Shrines, Nature, and History in Early Modern France (Cambridge UP, 2019).

Pilgrim shrines were places of healing, holiness, and truth in early modern France. By analyzing the creation of these pilgrim shrines as natural, legendary, and historic places whose authority provided a new foundation for post-Reformation Catholic life, Virginia Reinburg examines the impact of the Reformation and religious wars on French society and the French landscape. Divided into two parts, Part I offers detailed studies of the shrines of Sainte-Reine, Notre-Dame du Puy, Notre-Dame de Garaison, and Notre-Dame de Betharram, showing how nature, antiquity, and images inspired enthusiasm among pilgrims. These chapters also show that the category of 'pilgrim' included a wide variety of motivations, beliefs, and acts. Part II recounts how shrine chaplains authored books employing history, myth, and archives in an attempt to prove that the shrines were authentic, and to show that the truths they exemplified were beyond dispute.

Elspeth Currie is a PhD student in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.

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Daniel Fairfax, "The Red Years of Cahiers Du Cinéma (1968-1973)" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. With a Marxist orientation inspired by the thinking of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, the "red years" of Cahiers du cinéma produced a theoretical outpouring that was formative for the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline in the 1970s, and is still of vital relevance for the contemporary audiovisual landscape. It was also the seminal experience for a generation of critics who have dedicated the following half-century to the task of critically responding to the cinema. Daniel Fairfax's The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973) (Amsterdam UP, 2021) gives a historical overview of this period in the journal's history, combining biographical accounts of the critics who were involved with Cahiers in the post-1968 and theoretical explorations of the text they wrote.

In this conversation with host Annie Berke, Dr. Fairfax describes the beginnings of his love of cinema, breaks down the most pivotal essays from this moment in Cahiers' history, and argues for the "annees rouge"'s continuing relevance to contemporary film and cultural criticism.

Note: This interview was conducted on May 16, three days before the passing of Jean-Louis Comolli at the age of 80. One of the most influential figures of Cahiers' Red Years (and, indeed, of the entire journal's run), Comolli made a tremendous impact on film theory and criticism, and he will be missed by cinephiles all over the world.

Daniel Fairfax is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.

Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms.

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Paul Galvez, "Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting" (Yale UP, 2022)

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

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Ashley M. Williard, "Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

Mon, 30 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Dr. Ashley M. Williard demonstrates how problematics of gender played a central role in defining colonial others, male and female, at the moment when slavery was first introduced in the French-controlled Antilles. The book argues that seventeenth-century French Caribbean reconstructions of masculinity and femininity helped sustain and justify occupation, slavery, and nascent ideas of race. In the face of historical silences, Williard’s close readings of archival and narrative texts reveals the words, images, and perspectives that reflected and produced new ideas of human difference in this colonial context. Juridical, religious, and medical discourses expose the interdependence of multiple conditions—male and female, enslaved and free, Black and white, Indigenous and displaced, normative and disabled—in the islands claimed for the French Crown.

R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world.

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Jacob Collins, "The Anthropological Turn: French Political Thought After 1968" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020)

Thu, 26 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Jacob Collins's The Anthropological Turn: French Political Through After 1968 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) examines some of the most important currents in French intellectual life through the 1970s. In the wake of the upheaval of 1968, and confronted with the economic and other crises of the decade that followed, a number of political thinkers and social theorists in France interrogated "the social" borrowing anthropological concepts and approaches to religion, identity, citizenship, and the state.

Collins's account of the decade focuses on the work of four key thinkers from across the political spectrum in France: Alain de Benoist, Marcel Gauchet, Emmanuel Todd, and Régis Debray. Across chapters that explore the work of these authors in depth, the book tracks the common methodological ground these figures shared, the individual and collective influence they exerted on the French political landscape of the era. In different ways, the book argues, the ideas of these and other "political anthropologists" have shaped approaches to fundamental social, political, and cultural questions in France over the past several decades. The Anthropological Turn will be a compelling read for students and scholars of French history, political thought, and culture from the last third of the twentieth century to the present.

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Adriana Alfaro Altamirano, "The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

Thu, 19 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Within the Western tradition, it was the philosophers Henri Bergson and Max Scheler who laid out and explored the nonrational power of "intuition" at work in human beings that plays a key role in orienting their thinking and action within the world. As author Adriana Alfaro Altamirano notes, Bergon's and Scheler's philosophical explorations, which paralleled similar developments by other modernist writers, artists, and political actors of the early twentieth century, can yield fruitful insights into the ideas and passions that animate politics in our own time.

The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) shows that intuition (as Bergson and Scheler understood it) leads, first and foremost, to a conception of freedom that is especially suited for dealing with hierarchy, uncertainty, and alterity. Such a conception of freedom is grounded in a sense of individuality that remains true to its "inner multiplicity," thus providing a distinct contrast to and critique of the liberal notion of the self.

Focusing on the complex inner lives that drive human action, as Bergson and Scheler did, leads us to appreciate the moral and empirical limits of liberal devices that mean to regulate our actions "from the outside." Such devices, like the law, may not only carry pernicious effects for freedom but, more troublingly, oftentimes "erase their traces," concealing the very ways in which they are detrimental to a richer experience of subjectivity.

According to Alfaro Altamirano, Bergson's and Scheler's conception of intuition and personal authority puts contemporary discussions about populism in a different light: It shows that liberalism would only at its own peril deny the anthropological, moral, and political importance of the bearers of charismatic authority. Personal authority thus understood relies on a dense, but elusive, notion of personality, for which personal authority is not only consistent with freedom, but even contributes to it in decisive ways.

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Carolyn J. Eichner, "The Paris Commune: A Brief History" (Rutgers UP, 2022)

Wed, 18 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Carolyn Eichner's new book, The Paris Commune: A Brief History (Rutgers University Press, 2022) was published on March 18th, the anniversary of the eruption of Paris Commune of 1871. In this accessible history of the 72-day uprising during which the working-class people of Paris established their own government; experimented with forms of radical democracy and social change; and resisted the forces of the French state and military, Eichner explores the Commune within the context of nineteenth-century political, economic, and cultural history in France and beyond its borders. Structured in three parts/chapters that take up the metaphorics of illumination, fluorescence, and explosion, the book follows the lives, ideas, and actions of Communards who sought to bring about a new society, and were ultimately crushed in their efforts. After two and a half months, the French government under the leadership of Adolphe Thiers crushed the Commune during the "Bloody Week" of May 21st-28th. Thousands of Communards met their violent ends in the streets of Paris while others were arrested, tried, and deported.

The book is short and rich, clear and dramatic, an excellent resource for students, readers academic and non, anyone interested in a smart, clear introduction to these events and figures with such mythological status in the histories of popular resistance and revolution. It is also a fascinating account for those more familiar with the Commune. Attentive to the role of women and gender throughout, and interested in understanding the Commune's achievements as well as its limitations, Eichner's account revisits some of the long-standing debates about the Commune's course, and its legacies. Bonne lecture!

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Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden, "From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Wed, 11 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Today’s copyright laws are predicated on the idea that music is intellectual property; a commodity that has value to its creator and to its publisher. But, how did that concept originate and why? From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2022) by Rebecca Geoffroy Schwinden tackles this question with an insightful examination of the years around the French Revolution when the legal protections for music moved from a system of monopolies granted by the sovereign that regulated music as an activity to a framework that assumed music was a kind of property. Before the French Revolution, making music was an activity that required permission. After the revolution, music was an object that could be possessed.In Geoffroy-Schwinden’s analysis, this is far from a simple history of commodification, it is, instead, a process entwined with the political, ideological, and cultural agendas of the French Revolutionaries. It is also a history of the development of new institutions, and how the Paris Conservatory, founded in the fluid and sometimes violent aftermath of the French Revolution, became the conservator and arbiter of French musical traditions and pedagogy. Musicians capitalized on new kinds of legal protections to guard their professionalization within new laws and institutions, while excluding those without credentials from their elite echelon.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Piotr H. Kosicki, "Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and 'Revolution,' 1891-1956" (Yale UP, 2018)

Mon, 09 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Poland in the 1940s and '50s, a new kind of Catholic intended to remake European social and political life--not with guns, but French philosophy.

Piotr H. Kosicki's book Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and 'Revolution,' 1891-1956 (Yale UP, 2018) examines generations of deeply religious thinkers whose faith drove them into public life, including Karol Wojtyla, future Pope John Paul II, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the future prime minister who would dismantle Poland's Communist regime.

Seeking to change the way we understand the Catholic Church, World War II, the Cold War, and communism, this study centers on the idea of "revolution." It examines two crucial countries, France and Poland, while challenging conventional wisdom among historians and introducing innovations in periodization, geography, and methodology. Why has much of Eastern Europe gone back down the road of exclusionary nationalism and religious prejudice since the end of the Cold War? Kosicki helps to understand the crises of contemporary Europe by examining the intellectual world of Roman Catholicism in Poland and France between the Church's declaration of war on socialism in 1891 and the demise of Stalinism in 1956.

Brenna Moore teaches in the Department of Theology at Fordham University and works in the areas of Catholic Intellectual History, particularly in modern Europe.

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Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022)Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Fri, 06 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

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Joan DeJean, "Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast" (Basic, 2022)

Mon, 02 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In 1719, a ship named La Mutine (the mutinous woman), sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the Mississippi. It was loaded with urgently needed goods for the fledgling French colony, but its principal commodity was a new kind of export: women.

Falsely accused of sex crimes, these women were prisoners, shackled in the ship's hold. Of the 132 women who were sent this way, only 62 survived. But these women carved out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property. Many were instrumental in the building of New Orleans and in settling Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, and Mississippi.

Drawing on an impressive range of sources to restore the voices of these women to the historical record, Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast (Basic, 2022) introduces us to the Gulf South's Founding Mothers.

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Lisa Reilly, "The Invention of Norman Visual Culture: Art, Politics, and Dynastic Ambition" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In The Invention of Norman Visual Culture: Art, Politics, and Dynastic Ambition (Cambridge UP, 2020), Lisa Reilly establishes a new interpretive paradigm for the eleventh and twelfth-century art and architecture of the Norman world in France, England, and Sicily. Traditionally, scholars have considered iconic works like the Cappella Palatina and the Bayeux Embroidery in a geographically piecemeal fashion that prevents us from seeing their full significance. Here, Reilly examines these works individually and within the larger context of a connected Norman world. Just as Rollo founded the Normandy "of different nationalities", the Normans created a visual culture that relied on an assemblage of forms. To the modern eye, these works are perceived as culturally diverse. As Reilly demonstrates, the multiple sources for Norman visual culture served to expand their meaning. Norman artworks represented the cultural mix of each locale, and the triumph of Norman rule, not just as a military victory but as a legitimate succession, and often as the return of true Christian rule.

Tanja Tolar is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

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Yveline Alexis, "Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte" (Rutgers UP, 2021)

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte (Rutgers University Press, 2021), by Yveline Alexis is the first US study of the politician and caco leader (guerrilla fighter) who fought against the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934. Alexis locates rare multilingual sources from both nations and documents Péralte's political movement and citizens' protests. The interdisciplinary work offers a new approach to studies of the US invasion period by documenting how Caribbean people fought back.

Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

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Elisabeth Anderson, "Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The beginnings of the modern welfare state are often traced to the late nineteenth-century labor movement and to policymakers’ efforts to appeal to working-class voters. But in Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State (Princeton UP, 2021), Elisabeth Anderson shows that the regulatory welfare state began a half-century earlier, in the 1830s, with the passage of the first child labor laws.

Agents of Reform tells the story of how middle-class and elite reformers in Europe and the United States defined child labor as a threat to social order, and took the lead in bringing regulatory welfare into being. They built alliances to maneuver around powerful political blocks and instituted pathbreaking new employment protections. Later in the century, now with the help of organized labor, they created factory inspectorates to strengthen and routinize the state’s capacity to intervene in industrial working conditions. Agents of Reform compares seven in-depth case studies of key policy episodes in Germany, France, Belgium, Massachusetts, and Illinois. Foregrounding the agency of individual reformers, it challenges existing explanations of welfare state development and advances a new pragmatist field theory of institutional change. In doing so, it moves beyond standard narratives of interests and institutions toward an integrated understanding of how these interact with political actors’ ideas and coalition-building strategies.

Agents of Reform is a pathbreaking contribution to our understanding of the emergence of the welfare state and the role of social movements in political reform.

Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist.

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Alice Jardine, "At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva (Bloomsbury, 2020) is the first biography of Julia Kristeva--one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the world. Alice Jardine brings Kristeva's work to a broader readership by connecting Kristeva's personal journey, from her childhood in Communist Bulgaria to her adult life as an international public intellectual based in Paris, with the history of her ideas. Informed by extensive interviews with Kristeva herself, this telling of a remarkable woman's life story also draws out the complexities of Kristeva's writing, emphasizing her call for an urgent revival of bold interdisciplinary thinking in order to understand--and to act in--today's world.

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Louis K. Epstein, "The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France" (Boydell, 2021)

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Patronage has long been an important topic of study in musicology, but is much more likely to be one that specialists in medieval or renaissance music research. In The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France (Boydell Press, 2021), Louis Epstein turns to patronage in the twentieth century to reveal an important part of the musical economy that is often overlooked. Many different types of patrons existed in this period, from music publishers and the French government to institutions and wealthy individuals. Far from mere sources of funding, early twentieth-century patrons collaborated closely with composers, treating commissions for new music as opportunities to express their own artistry. Although some of these patrons tried to interfere with the compositional process, most were engaged in a more subtle form of labor. For instance, they curated like-minded composers, encouraged people to write in expensive genres like opera or orchestral music, and supported French nationalism. Epstein also finds that the French example helped to influence the flowering of institutional patronage in post-World War II America.

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Nu-Anh Tran, "Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In popular understandings of the modern history of Vietnam we are familiar with Ho Chi Minh’s anti-imperialism, but we know much less about the anticommunist nationalism of South Vietnam – officially the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). The RVN tends to be viewed as a creation of the French and later a “puppet” of the Americans. But as Nu-Anh Tran shows in her book, Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam (U Hawaii Press, 2022), the RVN was heir to a revolutionary tradition that developed out of the anti-French resistance, that was quite distinct from the communist one to the north. Although the many different political and religious factions in the south shared a fierce anticommunism, the RVN was plagued by disunity. And ironically, despite the democratic ideals that these groups claimed to advocate, the RVN was subject to authoritarian rule for most of its brief existence.

Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au.

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Abigail Susik, "Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work" (Manchester UP, 2021)

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

According to the definition offered by Tate on the occasion of the exhibition Surrealism Without Borders, Surrealism “aims to revolutionise human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams.” Surrealism, therefore, produces images and artefacts that are rooted outside the real and that evade rational description.

For many artists, however, the practice of Surrealist art took on an explicitly political and therefore practical dimensions. In Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester UP, 2021), art historian Abigail Susik argues that many Surrealists tried to transform the work of art into a form of unmanageable anti-work.

Abigail Susik speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about what the politics of work meant to the early French Surrealists, the ambiguous labour practices of artists like Simone Breton, and the imagery of typewriters and sewing machines that permeates the work of artists such as Oscar Domínguez. She brings these questions into the present by engaging with the work of the Chicago Surrealists of the 1960s and 70s.

Abigail Susik is Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University and co-editor of Surrealism and film after 1945.

Man Ray, Séance de rêve éveiillé
Oscar Domínguez, Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle
Surrealism Without Borders at Tate Modern
Abigail’s op-eds in the Washington Post and New York Times
Abigail’s forthcoming book Radical Dreams

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Elayne Oliphant, "The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris" (UChicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

France, officially, is a secular nation. Yet Catholicism is undeniably a monumental presence, defining the temporal and spatial rhythms of Paris. At the same time, it often fades into the background as nothing more than “heritage.” In a creative inversion, Elayne Oliphant asks in The Privilege of Being Banal what, exactly, is hiding in plain sight? Could the banality of Catholicism actually be a kind of hidden power?

Exploring the violent histories and alternate trajectories effaced through this banal backgrounding of a crucial aspect of French history and culture, this richly textured ethnography lays bare the profound nostalgia that undergirds Catholicism’s circulation in nonreligious sites such as museums, corporate spaces, and political debates. Oliphant’s aim is to unravel the contradictions of religion and secularism and, in the process, show how aesthetics and politics come together in contemporary France to foster the kind of banality that Hannah Arendt warned against: the incapacity to take on another person’s experience of the world. A creative meditation on the power of the taken-for-granted, The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is a landmark study of religion, aesthetics, and public space.

Elayne Oliphant is an assistant professor of anthropology and religious studies at New York University.

Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He can be found on Twitter @arman_c.

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Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, "All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State (Oxford UP, 2022) attempts to answer one of the most urgent questions of our time: what is the relationship between modern states and disasters? Disasters are commonly understood as exceptional occurrences that ruin societies and inspire ad hoc rituals of legal, administrative, and scientific control called 'disaster management.' States and the international institutions perform disaster management to protect society. The book challenges this traditional narrative. It interprets 'disaster management' as a historical struggle to conservate the existence and experience of catastrophes and produce idealized authorities capable of protecting society from uncertainty. It examines the emergence of this struggle in the eighteenth century and reveals how rulers and experts struggling to master God, Nature, and each other, inaugurated modern meanings of risk, normalcy, power, and responsibility.

By recovering this history of disaster management, the book reveals underlying legal structures and political-economies that smuggle the unspoken costs of modernity inside the rationalized representation of past catastrophes and future risks. Catastrophes, put bluntly, are not occurrences. They are inventions. Even in their most destructive forms, catastrophes are the stigmata through which the modern state renews itself. The book develops this argument by examining the Marseille plague (1720), the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the Bengal famine (1770), and showing how eighteenth-century beliefs reverberate in structure and policies of 'global' disaster management today. It concludes that Climate Change and the national and international authorities designed to fight it, are products of three centuries of disaster management, and civilizational survival depends onreckoning with this past.

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Tessa Murphy, "The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Tessa Murphy traces how generations of Indigenous Kalinagos, free and enslaved Africans, and settlers from a variety of European nations used maritime routes to forge social, economic, and informal political connections that spanned the eastern Caribbean. Focusing on a chain of volcanic islands, each one visible from the next, whose societies developed outside the sphere of European rule until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Murphy argues that the imperial frameworks typically used to analyze the early colonial Caribbean are at odds with the geographic realities that shaped daily life in the region.

Through use of wide-ranging sources including historical maps, parish records, an Indigenous-language dictionary, and colonial correspondence housed in the Caribbean, France, England, and the United States, Murphy shows how this watery borderland became a center of broader imperial experimentation, contestation, and reform. British and French officials dispatched to Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago after 1763 encountered a creolized society that repeatedly frustrated their attempts to transform the islands into productive plantation colonies. By centering the stories of Kalinagos who asserted continued claims to land, French Catholics who demanded the privileges of British subjects, and free people of African descent who insisted on their right to own land and enslaved people, Murphy offers a vivid counterpoint to larger Caribbean plantation societies like Jamaica and Barbados.

By looking outward from the eastern Caribbean chain, The Creole Archipelago resituates small islands as microcosms of broader historical processes central to understanding early American and Atlantic history, including European usurpation of Indigenous lands, the rise of slavery and plantation production, and the creation and codification of racial difference.

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Daniel Chirot, "You Say You Want a Revolution?: Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Why have so many of the iconic revolutions of modern times ended in bloody tragedies? And what lessons can be drawn from these failures today, in a world where political extremism is on the rise and rational reform based on moderation and compromise often seems impossible to achieve? In You Say You Want a Revolution?: Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences (Princeton University Press, 2020), Daniel Chirot examines a wide range of right- and left-wing revolutions around the world--from the late eighteenth century to today--to provide important new answers to these critical questions.

From the French Revolution of the eighteenth century to the Mexican, Russian, German, Chinese, anticolonial, and Iranian revolutions of the twentieth, Chirot finds that moderate solutions to serious social, economic, and political problems were overwhelmed by radical ideologies that promised simpler, drastic remedies. But not all revolutions had this outcome. The American Revolution didn't, although its failure to resolve the problem of slavery eventually led to the Civil War, and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was relatively peaceful, except in Yugoslavia. From Japan, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia to Algeria, Angola, Haiti, and Romania, You Say You Want a Revolution? explains why violent radicalism, corruption, and the betrayal of ideals won in so many crucial cases, why it didn't in some others--and what the long-term prospects for major social change are if liberals can't deliver needed reforms.

Daniel Chirot is the Herbert J. Ellison Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Washington.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Eliza Jane Smith, "Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France" (Lexington Books, 2021)

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Eliza Jane Smith's Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France (Lexington Books, 2021) applies a sociolinguistic approach to the representation of slang in French literature and dictionaries to reveal the ways in which upper-class writers, lexicographers, literary critics, and bourgeois readers participated in a sociolinguistic concept the author refers to as "literary slumming", or the appropriation of lower-class and criminal language and culture. Through an analysis of spoken and embodied manifestations of the anti-language of slang in the works of Eugène François Vidocq, Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, the Goncourt Brothers, and Émile Zola, Literary Slumming argues that the nineteenth-century French literary discourse on slang led to the emergence of this sociolinguistic phenomenon that prioritised lower-class and criminal life and culture in a way that ultimately expanded class boundaries and increased visibility and agency for minorities within the public sphere.

Pallavi Joshi is a PhD student in French Studies at the University of Warwick.

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Sarah Farmer, "Rural Inventions: The French Countryside After 1945" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Sarah Farmer's Rural Inventions: The French Countryside After 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a history of national, regional, and local transformations during the period known as the Trente Glorieuses in France from 1945 to 1975. Rural communities and landscapes did not disappear during these years, but existed in complex relationship to urban populations, spaces, economies, and culture. "Modernization" was also a phenomenon in the countryside in various ways and the myth of an unchanging peasant world was just that.

Examining state infrastructural and agricultural plans and projects; a rising French and international interest in second, "country" homes; utopian rural experiments and environmental activisms; peasant autobiographies; and (sometimes) nostalgic representations of rural life and landscapes in photographs and other visual sources, the book considers a range of objects and perspectives from/on the French countryside. Packed with compelling stories, actors, and arguments about some of the fundamental contradictions that structured French society during this period, the book challenges us to question our assumptions about what we mean when we say or think "rural" and "postwar" together.

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Peter Salmon, "An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida" (Verso, 2020)

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

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Sarah Shortall, "Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics (Harvard University Press, 2021), Sarah Shortall examines the twentieth-century transformation of Roman Catholicism by tracing the origins and evolution of the so-called nouvelle théologie. Developed in the interwar years by French Jesuits and Dominicans, “new theology” reimagined the Church’s relationship to public life, encouraging political activism, engaging with secular philosophy, and inspiring doctrinal changes adopted by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. By recoding political statements in the ostensibly apolitical language of doctrine, priests were able to enter into debates over fascism and communism, democracy and human rights, and colonialism and nuclear war.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).

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Patricia Tilburg, "Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 05:00:00 -0000

Patricia Tilburg's Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919 (Oxford University Press, 2019) is at once a cultural, gender, urban, and labour history of the Belle Epoque era. The midinette is the central figure the book chases across serval chapters. Named for the lunch hour when thousands of female garment workers spilled into the streets of Paris each day, she became a symbol of French taste and skill, the embodiment of productive labour and the pleasures of the modern capital. Represented by a range of observers during the period as young, cheerful, attractive, and sexually available, the midinette became the subject of (male) fantasy and philanthropy, her image working to assuage anxieties about a rapidly changing world.

The lived experiences and activisms of the women workers who inspired these projections play significant roles throughout the book. Using a wide array of sources--state and police documents, municipal and philanthropic archival collections, press, fiction, music, letters, and more--the author ensures that the conditions of their working lives, their voices and demands, do not get lost in the swirl of ideas surrounding them. A cultural history that moves deftly between the material and the metaphoric, Working Girls is a pleasure to read, and I so enjoyed speaking with its author.

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Stuart Elden, "The Early Foucault" (Polity Press, 2021)

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

It was not until 1961 that Foucault published his first major book, History of Madness. He had already been working as an academic for a decade, teaching in Lille and Paris, writing, organizing cultural programmes and lecturing in Uppsala, Warsaw and Hamburg. Although he published little in this period, Foucault wrote much more, some of which has been preserved and only recently become available to researchers.

Drawing on archives in France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and the USA, Stuart Elden's The Early Foucault (Polity Press, 2021) is the most detailed study yet of Foucault's early career. It recounts his debt to teachers including Louis Althusser, Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean Wahl; his diploma thesis on Hegel; and his early teaching career. It explores his initial encounters with Georges Canguilhem, Jacques Lacan, and Georges Dumézil, and analyses his sustained reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Also included are detailed discussions of his translations of Ludwig Binswanger, Victor von Weizsäcker, and Immanuel Kant; his clinical work with Georges and Jacqueline Verdeaux; and his cultural work outside of France.

Investigating how Foucault came to write History of Madness, Stuart Elden shows this great thinker's deep engagement with phenomenology, anthropology and psychology. An outstanding, meticulous work of intellectual history, The Early Foucault sheds new light on the formation of a major twentieth-century figure.

Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

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Nathaniel L. Moir, "Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare (Oxford UP, 2021), Dr. Nathaniel L. Moir studies the thought of this overlooked figure, one of the most important experts on counterinsurgency warfare in Indochina. Dr. Moir’s intellectual history analyses Fall’s formative experiences: his service in the French underground and army during the Second World War; his father’s execution by the Germans and his mother’s murder in Auschwitz; and his work as a research analyst at the Nuremberg Trials. Moir demonstrates how these critical events made Fall “an insightful analyst of war because of the experience and knowledge he brought to his study and his early recognition of the Viet Minh’s approach to warfare, which they used to defeat the French in 1954 during the First Indochina War.”

Dr. Moir investigates how Bernard Fall understood and described Vietnamese revolutionary warfare in Indochina after World War II.The book tells a history indelibly tied to Bernard Fall, but also centers on the unique circumstances through which Fall came to identify, study, and describe revolutionary warfare in Indochina.

In the years before conventional American intervention in 1965, Fall argued that—far more than anything in the United States’ military arsenal—resolving conflict in Vietnam would require political strength, willpower, integrity and skill. Number One Realist illuminates Fall’s study of political reconciliation in Indochina, while showing how his profound, humanitarian critique of war continues to echo in the endless conflicts of the present.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Micah Alpaugh, "Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

As the old cliché goes, “there must have been something in the water.” A new book by historian Micah Alpaugh, Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (Cambridge UP, 2021), courses a thread through the various disorders that riddled the Atlantic World in the late-eighteenth century. Alpaugh searches for and brings to light commonalities that spread through regions circling the North Atlantic. From the Caribbean islands to Ireland; France, colonial America, and the United Kingdom, “Liberty” and “Freedom” conjoined a patchwork of disparate people who gave rise to social movements roughly at the same moment in history.

Alpaugh’s archival research is astounding and unearthed new ways of looking at eighteenth-century revolutions beginning with the United State and ending with Haiti. In Friends of Freedom, Alpaugh reconfigures Boston’s “Sons of Liberty” as a social leviathan that swept the eastern seaboard of North America thereby becoming emulated by similar clubs of men and women in Britain, France, and Ireland – i.e., “friends of freedom.” What Alpaugh proves, without a doubt, were the incredible transatlantic networks by which social movement spread, movements that inspired powerful forces on both sides of the Atlantic. The rise of abolitionism, for example, connected moral philosophers, clerics, and thinkers throughout this large ocean basin as the Enlightened values of liberty and freedom became haltingly extended to all ranks of Atlantic society.

Joseph Krulder is a historian of Britain's long eighteenth-century: cultural, social, military, and economic.

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Marco Wyss, "Postcolonial Security: Britain, France, and West Africa's Cold War" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In light of the discrepancy between Britain’s and France’s postcolonial security roles in Africa, which seemed already determined half a decade after independence, this book studies the making of the postcolonial security relationship during the transfer of power and the early years of independence (1958-1966). It focuses on West Africa, and more specifically the newly independent states of Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, which rapidly evolved into key players in the postcolonial struggle for Africa.

Based on research conducted in fourteen archives in Africa, Europe, and the United States, Postcolonial Security: Britain, France, and West Africa's Cold War (Oxford UP, 2021) comparatively investigates the establishment of formal defence relations, the disintegration of the Anglo-Nigerian ‘special relationship’ and the Franco-Ivorian ‘neo-colonial collusion’, the provision of British and French military assistance to their former colonies and the competition they faced from West Germany and Israel respectively, and the Anglo-American partnership in Nigeria and the Franco-American rivalry in Côte d’Ivoire. It demonstrates that whereas Britain was rapidly and increasingly pushed out of and replaced in the Nigerian security sector by western competitors, France succeeded in retaining its military foothold and pre-eminence in Côte d’Ivoire. Informed by postcolonial approaches, Postcolonial Security argues that while London’s Cold War blinkers and Paris’s neo-imperial agenda were part of the equation, the postcolonial security relationship was ultimately determined by the Nigerian and Ivorian elites, which in turn responded to their local and regional circumstances against the background of the Cold War in Africa.

Marco Wyss is a Reader in International History and Security at Lancaster University, a Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, and an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.

Dong Wang is distinguished professor of history and director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

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Rita Koganzon, "Liberal States, Authoritarian Families: Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Rita Koganzon’s new book, Liberal States, Authoritarian Families: Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought (Oxford UP, 2021), examines the structure and function of the family within early modern political thought while also teasing out the way that early childhood education may often be at odds with the claims to freedom within liberal states. Koganzon’s book traces the problem of authority in early modern thought in regard to how children need to be managed by those who are responsible for them—and how they are to be taught to be citizens, to be free, to have liberty, and to understand sovereignty. All of these teachings are complicated by the need to impose an authority of knowledge and expertise in the course of a child’s education. When these forms of authority are contextualized within liberal states, the tension is obvious between the idea of individual liberty and freedom, as pursued by adults in society, and the need to educate through this position of the authority of knowledge.

Koganzon’s work traces the approach and theorizing about the family and education through the work of Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. But the book starts with Hannah Arendt’s insight about education being an “inherently authoritarian undertaking” and that this is the conundrum for contemporary liberal thinkers. The first sections of the book examine the rise of sovereignty theory, especially in the work of Bodin and Hobbes. This work also brings up the logic of congruence, that the sovereign and the patriarch should be mirrors of each other in terms of their rule within their distinct realms. The thrust of the book, though, is in the exploration of the work by Locke and Rousseau, and their critiques of the sovereignty theory put forward by those who preceded them. Koganzon examines how both Locke’s work and Rousseau’s work also push against the logic of congruence in terms of the form of education. Liberal States, Authoritarian Families delves into the problem, particularly for Locke and Rousseau, of the tyranny of public opinion (the problem of peer pressure is real!), and how anti-authoritarian liberalism, particularly in the contemporary period, has done away with many of the components of authoritarianism within education that helped to limit this tyranny. This is a very clear and lively discussion and will be of interest to a wide range of readers and scholars.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Susan Gilson Miller, "Years of Glory: Nelly Benatar and the Pursuit of Justice in Wartime North Africa" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

When France fell to Hitler's armies in June 1940, a flood of refugees fleeing Nazi terror quickly overwhelmed Europe's borders and spilled across the Mediterranean to North Africa, touching off a humanitarian crisis of dizzying proportions. Nelly Benatar, a highly regarded Casablancan Jewish lawyer, quickly claimed a role of rescuer and almost single-handedly organized a sweeping program of wartime refugee relief. But for all her remarkable achievements, Benatar's story has never been told.

In Years of Glory: Nelly Benatar and the Pursuit of Justice in Wartime North Africa (Stanford UP, 2021), Susan Gilson Miller introduces readers to a woman who fought injustice as an anti-Fascist resistant, advocate for refugee rights, liberator of Vichy-run forced labor camps, and legal counselor to hundreds of Holocaust survivors. Miller crafts a gripping biography that spins a tale like a Hollywood thriller, yet finds its truth in archives gathered across Europe, North Africa, Israel, and the United States and from Benatar's personal collection of eighteen thousand documents now housed in the US Holocaust Museum.

Years of Glory offers a rich narrative and a deeper understanding of the complex currents that shaped Jewish, North African, and world history over the course of the Second World War. The traumas of genocide, the struggle for anti-colonial liberation, and the eventual Jewish exodus from Arab lands all take on new meaning when reflected through the interstices of Benatar's life. A courageous woman with a deep moral conscience and an iron will, Nelly Benatar helped to lay the groundwork for crucial postwar efforts to build a better world over Europe's ashes.

Avery Weinman is a PhD student in History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She researches Jewish history in the modern Middle East and North Africa, with emphasis on Sephardi and Mizrahi radicals in British Mandatory Palestine. She can be reached at averyweinman@ucla.edu.

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Jeffrey H. Jackson, "Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis" (Algonquin Books, 2020)

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Want to read a fantastic book about art, love, politics, and resistance during the Second World War? Jeffrey H. Jackson's Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis (Algonquin Books, 2020) is a riveting account of the lives of Lucy Schwob/Claude Cahun) and Suzanne Malherbe/Marcel Moore, two French artists whose remarkable creative and romantic relationship spanned many tumultuous decades. The story of their love and work activates important themes and questions regarding the histories of art, gender, sexuality, the avant-garde, Jewishness, and more during this period of French and European history.

Offering readers fresh perspective on the deep connection that Lucy/Claude and Suzanne/Marcel shared, the book is focused on the period from the late-1930s through the end of the Second World War when the pair lived together on the German-Occupied island of Jersey in the English Channel. Drawing on extensive research in archives hitherto been neglected by other scholars, Paper Bullets tells the fascinating story of the ways Lucy and Suzanne challenged German authority through a secret campaign of "paper bullets," notes and other tokens they left for German soldiers to find in unexpected places--a church collection box, the windshield of a car, a coat pocket, etc. These missives posed questions, made jokes, expressed resistance, and eventually got the two arrested, tried, and sentenced to death (the sentence was appealed just before the end of the war). Exciting and inspiring, this history will be compelling to readers across multiple fields and interests. I just couldn't put it down and was delighted to have this chance to speak to its author.

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Megan Moore, "The Erotics of Grief: Emotions and the Construction of Privilege in the Medieval Mediterranean" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Erotics of Grief: Emotions and the Construction of Privilege in the Medieval Mediterranean (Cornell UP, 2021) considers how emotions propagate power by exploring whose lives are grieved and what kinds of grief are valuable within and eroticized by medieval narratives. Megan Moore argues that grief is not only routinely eroticized in medieval literature but that it is a foundational emotion of medieval elite culture.

Focusing on the concept of grief as desire, Moore builds on the history of the emotions and Georges Bataille's theory of the erotic as the conflict between desire and death, one that perversely builds a sense of community organized around a desire for death. The link between desire and death serves as an affirmation of living communities. Moore incorporates literary, visual, and codicological evidence in sources from across the Mediterranean—from Old French chansons de geste, such as the Song of Roland and La mort le roi Artu and romances such as Erec et Enide, Philomena, and Floire et Blancheflor; to Byzantine and ancient Greek novels; to Middle English travel narratives such as Mandeville's Travels.

In her reading of the performance of grief as one of community and remembrance, Moore assesses why some lives are imagined as mattering more than others and explores how a language of grief becomes a common language of status among the medieval Mediterranean elite.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Brenna Moore, "Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Thu, 20 Jan 2022 11:00:00 -0000

In Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Brenna Moore takes us inside a global network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century. With meticulous attention to the complexity of real lives, Brenna Moore explores how this group sought a middle way anchored in “spiritual friendship”—religiously meaningful friendship understood as uniquely capable of facing social and political challenges. Some of the figures are still well-known—philosopher Jacques Maritain, Nobel Prize laureate Gabriela Mistral, influential Islamicist Louis Massignon, poet of the Harlem renaissance Claude McKay—while others have unjustly faded from memory. Friendship, they believed, was a key to both divine and human realms, a means of accessing the transcendent while also engaging with our social and political existence.

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Julie Kleinman, "Adventure Capital: Migration and the Making of an African Hub in Paris" (U California Press, 2019)

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Every day, hundreds of thousands of people move through the Gare du Nord train station in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, the largest train station in Europe. Julie Kleinman's Adventure Capital: Migration and the Making of an African Hub in Paris (University of California Press, 2019) delves into the contemporary life of the station, and especially the lives and social world of the West African migrants who congregate there daily. The project makes connections between twentieth and twenty-first-century stories and politics and the longer-term of the Gare du Nord as a transportation hub and a crossroads for French histories of urban infrastructure, labour and class, mobility, racial inequality, and identity (African and French primarily in this case).

Drawing on a decade of archival and fieldwork that included the investigation of state and police archives, an internship at the Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF-the French national railway company), as well as in-depth interviews and interactions with a group of (mostly male) West African migrants who spend time regularly at the station, the book is a fascinating exploration of the community and life strategies of migrants in and around this practical and social hub where issues of labour, employment, surveillance, violence, resistance, family, and friendship meet. Informed by a deep knowledge of the broader historical and contemporary culture and politics of France and empire, the book stays close to the perspectives, stories, and analyses of the West African "adventurers" at the heart of the project. In doing so, it also offers a compelling and illuminating view of the Gare du Nord and all that its busy spaces lead to and from within and beyond the borders of France.

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Martin Conway, "Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968 (Princeton UP, 2021), Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how Western Europe’s postwar democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces—primarily Christian and social democratic—that espoused democratic values. Above all, it gained the support of the people, for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations of a more prosperous society.

This democratic order did not, however, endure. Its hierarchies of class, gender, and race, which initially gave it its strength, as well as the strains of decolonization and social change, led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic freedoms in the 1960s, and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late twentieth century.

Western Europe’s Democratic Age is a compelling history that sheds new light not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future.

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Aro Velmet, "Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, Its Colonies, and the World" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Aro Velmet's Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology in France, Its Colonies, and the World (Oxford UP, 2020) is a complex history of the Pasteur Institutes, a network of scientific laboratories established in France and throughout the French empire, beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The book examines the crucial roles Pastorians and Pasteurization played in the imperial project in and between different locations, particularly in Southeast Asia and Africa. Participating in the "civilizing mission," helping to establish and maintain industrial monopolies, and the control of colonial bodies through public health regulation and disease management, the institutes had a tremendous political impact.

Attentive to the experiences and perspectives of the Vietnamese and African peoples in the sites the book focuses on, Pasteur's Empire examines a range of scientific responses and measures, from the study and containment of infectious and epidemic disease to the microbiological aspects of industry. The book's chapters move from "Indochina" to North and West Africa, tracing the way that Pastorians and Pasteurization worked with(in) and sometimes pushed against colonial structures and assumptions. French modernity and the "civilizing mission" had profound and practical biological dimensions. A history that pursues ideas about modernity and the meanings of scientific and other forms of mobility, Pasteur's Empire moves from the local to the global while bringing together science, medicine, and politics. Enjoy the episode!

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Diana S. Kim, "Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition Across Southeast Asia" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia (Princeton University Press, 2020) Diana Kim situates the regulation of vice at the heart of colonial state building. Through a layered comparison of opium prohibition in Burma, Malaya and Vietnam she shows how petty bureaucrats told stories to one another about opium that incrementally transformed into official problems, which those same bureaucrats and their successors had to solve. Prohibition did not come through grand decisions and decisive moments in old European metropoles and new international organizations so much as it did via accumulated observations and interpretations by thousands of “bad ethnographers” in the British and French imperial civil services.

Empires of Vice won the Giovanni Sartori Best Book Award, Qualitative Methods Section of the American Political Science Association, and got honourable mentions from the committees for the Charles Taylor Book Award, Interpretive Methodologies and Methods section of APSA, and the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award, Social Science History Association.

This is the fifth episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to featuring an exemplary monograph in interpretive political or social science. The others are Natasha Behl on Gendered Citizenship, Lisa Wedeen on Authoritarian Apprehensions, James Scott on Against the Grain, and Sarah Wiebe on Everyday Exposure. To download or stream episodes in the series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science.

Nick Cheesman is an associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University. He is a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group and co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network.

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Michel Foucault, "Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970-1980)" (U of Minnesota Press, 2021)

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970-1980) (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), edited by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, is a groundbreaking collection of writings by Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group documenting their efforts to expose France's inhumane treatment of prisoners

Founded by Michel Foucault and others in 1970-71, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) circulated information about the inhumane conditions within the French prison system. Intolerable makes available for the first time in English a fully annotated compilation of materials produced by the GIP during its brief but influential existence, including an exclusive new interview with GIP member Hélène Cixous and writings by Gilles Deleuze and Jean Genet.

These archival documents--public announcements, manifestos, reports, pamphlets, interventions, press conference statements, interviews, and round table discussions--trace the GIP's establishment in post-1968 political turmoil, the new models of social activism it pioneered, the prison revolts it supported across France, and the retrospective assessments that followed its denouement. At the same time, Intolerable offers a rich, concrete exploration of Foucault's concept of resistance, providing a new understanding of the arc of his intellectual development and the genesis of his most influential book, Discipline and Punish.

Presenting the account of France's most vibrant prison resistance movement in its own words and on its own terms, this significant and relevant collection also connects the approach and activities of the GIP to radical prison resistance movements today.

Kevin Thompson is professor of philosophy at DePaul University. He is author of Hegel’s Theory of Normativity.

Perry Zurn is assistant professor of philosophy at American University. He is coeditor of Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge (Minnesota, 2020) and Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition.

Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades.

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Philip Larratt-Smith and Juliet Mitchell, "Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter" (Yale UP, 2021)

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

From 1952 to 1985, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) underwent extensive Freudian analysis that probed her family history, marriage, motherhood, and artistic ambition--and generated inspiration for her artwork. Examining the impact of psychoanalysis on Bourgeois's work, this volume offers insight into her creative process. Philip Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois's literary archivist, provides an overview of the artist's life and work and the ways in which the psychoanalytic process informed her artistic practice. An essay by Juliet Mitchell offers a cutting-edge feminist psychoanalyst's viewpoint on the artist's long and complex relationship with therapy. In addition, a short text written by Bourgeois (first published in 1991) addresses Freud's own relationship to art and artists. Featuring excerpts from Bourgeois's copious diaries, rarely seen notebook pages, and archival family photographs, Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter (Yale UP, 2021) opens exciting new avenues for understanding an innovative, influential, and groundbreaking artist whose wide-ranging work includes not only renowned large-scale sculptures but also a plethora of paintings and prints.

Isak de Vries is psychoanalyst in private practice in New York, NY.

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Jennifer Ferng and Lauren R. Cannady, "Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks" (Voltaire Foundation, 2021)

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

A ground-breaking volume examining the transnational conditions of the European Enlightenment, Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks (Voltaire Foundation, 2021) argues that artisans of the long eighteenth-century on four different continents created and disseminated ideas that revolutionized how we understand modern-day craftsmanship, design, labor, and technology. Starting in Europe, this book journeys through France across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and then on to Asia and Oceania. Highlighting diverse identities of artisans, the authors trace how these historical actors formed networks at local and global levels to assert their own forms of expertise and experience. These artisans – some anonymous, eminent, and outside the margins – translated European Enlightenment thinking into a number of disciplines and trades including architecture, botany, ceramics, construction, furniture, gardening, horology, interior design, manuscript illustration, and mining. In each thematic section of this illustrated volume, two leading scholars present contrasting case studies of artisans in different geographic contexts. These paired chapters are also followed by shorter commentary that reflects on pertinent themes from both chapters. Emphasizing how and why artisanal histories around the world impacted civic and private life, commerce, cultural engagement, and sense of place, this book introduces new richness and depth to the conversations around the ambivalent and fragmented nature of the Enlightenment.

Lauren R. Cannady, assistant clinical professor in University Honors at the University of Maryland, is a historian of early modern art and architecture with an interest in intellectual and cultural history.

Jennifer Ferng is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Postgraduate Director at the University of Sydney. She received her PhD from MIT.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie.

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Michael S. Neiberg, "When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Fri, 03 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

According to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the "most shocking single event" of World War II was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather the fall of France in spring 1940. Michael Neiberg offers a dramatic history of the American response--a policy marked by panic and moral ineptitude, which placed the United States in league with fascism and nearly ruined the alliance with Britain.

The successful Nazi invasion of France destabilized American planners' strategic assumptions. At home, the result was huge increases in defense spending, the advent of peacetime military conscription, and domestic spying to weed out potential fifth columnists. Abroad, the United States decided to work with Vichy France despite its pro-Nazi tendencies. The US-Vichy partnership, intended to buy time and temper the flames of war in Europe, severely strained Anglo-American relations. American leaders naively believed that they could woo men like Philippe Pétain, preventing France from becoming a formal German ally. The British, however, understood that Vichy was subservient to Nazi Germany and instead supported resistance figures such as Charles de Gaulle. After the war, the choice to back Vichy tainted US-French relations for decades.

Our collective memory of World War II as a period of American strength overlooks the desperation and faulty decision making that drove US policy from 1940 to 1943. Tracing the key diplomatic and strategic moves of these formative years, When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance (Harvard UP, 2021) gives us a more nuanced and complete understanding of the war and of the global position the United States would occupy afterward.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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Devin J. Vartija, "The Color of Equality: Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The Enlightenment is often either praised as the wellspring of modern egalitarianism or condemned as the cradle of scientific racism. How should we make sense of this paradox? The Color of Equality: Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) is the first book to investigate both the inclusive language of common humanity and the hierarchical language of race in Enlightenment thought, seeking to understand how eighteenth-century thinkers themselves made sense of these tensions. Using three major Enlightenment encyclopedias from England, France, and Switzerland, the book provides a rich contextualization of the conflicting ideas of equality and race in eighteenth-century thought.

Enlightenment thinkers used physical features to categorize humanity into novel "racial" groups in a discourse that was imbued with Eurocentric aesthetic and moral judgments. Simultaneously, however, these very same thinkers politicized equality by putting it to new uses, such as a vitriolic denunciation of slavery and inhumane treatment that was grounded in the nascent philosophy of human rights. Vartija contends that the tension between Enlightenment ideas of race and equality can best be explained by these thinkers' attempt to provide a naturalistic account of humanity, including both our physical and moral attributes. Enlightenment racial classification fits into the novel inclusion of humanity in histories of nature, while the search for the origins of morality in social experience alone lent equality a normative authority it had not previously possessed.

Eschewing straightforward approbation or blame of the Enlightenment, The Color of Equality demonstrates that our present-day thinking about human physical and cultural diversity continues to be deeply informed by an eighteenth-century European intellectual revolution with global ramifications.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie.

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Shawn F. McHale, "The First Vietnam War: Violence, Sovereignty, and the Fracture of the South, 1945-1956" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

When people think of the “Vietnam War” they usually think of the hugely devastating and divisive conflict between North Vietnam and a United States-backed South Vietnam that finally ended in 1975. We know much less about the earlier conflict, often referred to as the “First Indochina War”, from 1946 to 1954, which ended almost a century of French colonial rule and brought about the division of the country into North and South Vietnam. In his new book, The First Vietnam War: Sovereignty and the Fracture of the South, 1945-1956 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Shawn McHale examines this earlier conflict, focussing on the complex and diverse society of south Vietnam. The book begins with a provocative question: why did the communist-led resistance against French colonial rule in Vietnam fail in the south? This is an exhaustively researched book which does a lot to change our understanding of how south Vietnam became independent, and helps explain what came after the end of the “first Vietnam War”.

Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au.

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Daniel Lee, "The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Sovereignty is the vital organizing principle of modern international law. Daniel Lee's book The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations (Oxford UP, 2021) examines the origins of that principle in the legal and political thought of its most influential theorist, Jean Bodin (1529/30-1596). As the author argues in this study, Bodin's most lasting theoretical contribution was his thesis that sovereignty must be conceptualized as an indivisible bundle of legal rights constitutive of statehood. While these uniform 'rights of sovereignty' licensed all states to exercise numerous exclusive powers, including the absolute power to 'absolve' and release its citizens from legal duties, they were ultimately derived from, and therefore limited by, the law of nations. The book explores Bodin's creative synthesis of classical sources in philosophy, history, and the medieval legal science of Roman and canon law in crafting the rules governing state-centric politics.

The Right of Sovereignty is the first book in English on Bodin's legal and political theory to be published in nearly a half-century and surveys themes overlooked in modern Bodin scholarship: empire, war, conquest, slavery, citizenship, commerce, territory, refugees, and treaty obligations. It will interest specialists in political theory and the history of modern political thought, as well as legal history, the philosophy of law, and international law.

Tejas Parasher is Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at King’s College, University of Cambridge.

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Ambrogio A. Caiani, "To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII" (Yale UP, 2021)

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, and Pope Pius VII shared a common goal: to reconcile the Catholic church with the French state. But while they were able to work together initially, formalizing a Concordat in 1801, relations between them rapidly deteriorated. In 1809, Napoleon ordered the Pope’s arrest.

Dr. Ambrogio Caiani, Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Kent, in his book, To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII (Yale University Press, 2021), provides a pioneering account of the tempestuous relationship between the emperor and his most unyielding opponent. Drawing on original source materials in the Vatican and other European archives, Dr. Caiani uncovers the nature of Catholic resistance against Napoleon’s empire; charts Napoleon’s approach to Papal power; and reveals how the Emperor attempted to subjugate the church to his vision of modernity. Gripping and vivid, this splendid book shows the struggle for supremacy between two great individuals—and sheds new light on the conflict that would shape relations between the Catholic church and the modern state for centuries to come.

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Emile Chabal, "France" (Polity, 2020)

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

An accessible and compelling read, Emile Chabal's France (Polity, 2020) is an overview of the nation's political history from 1940 right up to the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Organized thematically around the paradoxes at the heart of the French Republic since the period of the Second World War (and with roots well before this period), the book is an excellent introduction to historical contests over what France means--and what it means to be "French"-- the legacies of which persist well into the twenty-first century.

An introduction that will be extremely helpful to students and non-specialists, the book also offers a reading and arguments regarding French politics and history that will inspire discuss among those more familiar with this terrain. In chapters that fit well together while making strong individual arguments, France examines defeat and resistance after 1940, the colonial and anti-colonial pasts, strategies and narratives of grandeur and decline, the political divisions of left and right, republicanism, and tensions between the local and global. Moving from a complex past towards what promises to be a no less complex future, the book is serious, smart, quick, and a pleasure to read.

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Susan Mokhberi, "The Persian Mirror: French Reflections of the Safavid Empire in Early Modern France" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Thu, 28 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

When I/we think about the early modern relationship between France and Persia, Montesquieu's 1721 Lettres persanes is a text that comes to mind immediately. Susan Mokhberi's The Persian Mirror: Reflections of the Safavid Empire in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2019) is a kind of a pre-history of Montesquieu's work that is, in different ways, more of a commentary on France and the French than Persia or Persians during this period. The Persian Mirror's several chapters examine a range of cultural and political texts, including letters, literature, travel writing, and material artifacts from the period, excavating the French relationship to Persia and Persian culture as both reflective and distorting.

Distinct from other sites in the region, Persia fascinated the French who were also hopeful that a political alliance with the Safavid Empire might work to counter the powerful Ottoman Empire. French observers in the period lingered on different forms of affinity between France and Persia while also tracking and commenting on the cultural divide that was evident in diplomatic and other exchanges between the two powers. The book brings together analysis of the French cultural imagination of Persia with a careful reading of real-life encounters such as the visit to France by the Persian ambassador Mohamed Beg in 1715. In addition to the perceptions of a common ground between cultures and political regimes, Franco-Persian relations also included misunderstanding and conflict. Concerns about the resemblance between France and Persia morphed and grew as political critiques of despotism, political power, decadence, and inequality emerged and proliferated in the period. After the fall of the Safavid Empire, France's anxious attention focused with increasing intensity on the Ottoman Empire into the later eighteenth century.

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Ethan Kleinberg, "Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, I interview Ethan Kleinberg, professor of history and letters at Wesleyan University, about his new book, Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought, recently published by Stanford University Press. In this rich intellectual history of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic lectures in Paris, Ethan Kleinberg addresses Levinas's Jewish life and its relation to his philosophical writings while making an argument for the role and importance of Levinas's Talmudic lessons.

The book, largely written in two columnar strands of text, explores the difference between Levinas’s conception of “God on Our Side” and “God on God’s Side” to animate two parallel and, at times, conflicting Talmudic readings Levinas engages in. One is historically situated and argued from "our side" while the other uses Levinas's Talmudic readings themselves to approach the issues as timeless and derived from "God on God's own side." Bringing the two approaches together, Kleinberg asks whether the ethical message and moral urgency of Levinas's Talmudic lectures can be extended beyond the texts and beliefs of a chosen people, religion, or even the seemingly primary unit of the self.

Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email.

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Andrea E. Duffy, "Nomad's Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Chronicling the retreat of mobile pastoralization from Mediterranean coastlines, Andrea Duffy's Nomad's Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World (U Nebraska Press, 2019) investigates a mystery: where did the sheep go? Duffy seeks the answer by exploring the relationship between forestry policy and pasteurization by comparing and contrasting the implementation of French Forestry in France's Provence, French colonial Algeria, and Ottoman Anatolia. Anxieties over deforestation drove the French forestry regime to marginalize active transhumant pastoral communities around the inner sea while altering imperial institutions and Mediterranean landscapes. The focus on the Mediterranean engages with a transnational study exhibiting the visible and invisible patterns and distinctions over time and shared space. Overstepping the political divisions among states highlights the geographical and ecological features framing the importance of diverging geographical and ecological features helpful in studying environmental studies. The Mediterranean framework of her argument works to investigate social and cultural connections while cutting across traditional political and ideological frontiers. An accessible, well-researched, and well-organized Nomad's Land demonstrates the legacy of Scientific Forestry, which contributed to the decline of forests and mobile pastoralism, reshaped traditional lands into a modern Mediterranean World.

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Gregory Jones-Katz, "Deconstruction: An American Institution" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The basic story of the rise, reign, and fall of deconstruction as a literary and philosophical groundswell is well known among scholars. In this intellectual history, Gregory Jones-Katz aims to transform the broader understanding of a movement that has been frequently misunderstood, mischaracterized, and left for dead—even as its principles and influence transformed literary studies and a host of other fields in the humanities. Deconstruction: An American Institution (The University of Chicago Press, 20121) begins well before Jacques Derrida’s initial American presentation of his deconstructive work in a famed lecture at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and continues through several decades of theoretic growth and tumult. While much of the subsequent story remains focused, inevitably, on Yale University and the personalities and curriculum that came to be lumped under the “Yale school” umbrella, Deconstruction makes clear how crucial feminism, queer theory, and gender studies also were to the lifeblood of this mode of thought. Ultimately, Jones-Katz shows that deconstruction in the United States—so often caricatured as a French infection—was truly an American phenomenon, rooted in our preexisting political and intellectual tensions, that eventually came to influence unexpected corners of scholarship, politics, and culture.

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John Shovlin, "Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order" (Yale UP, 2021)

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Britain and France waged war eight times in the century following the Glorious Revolution, a mutual antagonism long regarded as a "Second Hundred Years' War." Yet officials on both sides also initiated ententes, free trade schemes, and colonial bargains intended to avert future conflict. What drove this quest for a more peaceful order?

In Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order (Yale UP, 2021), John Shovlin reveals the extent to which Britain and France sought to divert their rivalry away from war and into commercial competition. The two powers worked to end future conflict over trade in Spanish America, the Caribbean, and India, and imagined forms of empire-building that would be more collaborative than competitive. They negotiated to cut cross-channel tariffs, recognizing that free trade could foster national power while muting enmity. This account shows that eighteenth-century capitalism drove not only repeated wars and overseas imperialism but spurred political leaders to strive for global stability.

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Jessica Namakkal, "Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Jessica Namakkal is assistant professor of the practice in international comparative studies at Duke University.

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Katherine Dauge-Roth, "Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France" (Routledge, 2019)

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Contemporary historians and other scholars of the body frequently use "writing" and "inscription as metaphors. Katherine Dauge-Roth's Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (Routledge, 2019) is an absorbing book that emphasizes literal, material forms of writing the body, taking skin as a "privileged surface," a physical site of expression, experience, and representation. Examining different types of corporeal marking from the later part of the sixteenth century through the eighteenth, the book focuses on inscription "from the outside," such as tattoos and branding, as well as marks on skin believed to have been made by supernatural forces, including stigmata and the "Devil's mark," the traces of God or of demonic possession/collaboration.

Examining a range of cases from France and the "French Atlantic" context, the book engages with the histories of Christianity, witchcraft, travel, settler colonialism, slavery, crime, and punishment. It takes up questions of religious belief, spirituality, gender, and sexuality within a broader context of great cultural and political upheaval, emergent and shifting technologies of writing and identity. Moving from convents and sites of pilgrimage to colonial and prison contexts, the chapters work as distinct case studies in conversation with multiple, complex historiographies that are linked to one another in and through bodily signs and markings. Along the way, Dauge-Roth complicates our understandings of agency and power, public and private, the role of the state, and the fashioning of the self throughout this period of French, European and imperial history. A history of early modern France, Signing the Body also holds much that will fascinate readers interests in the longer trajectory of body marking right up to the present.

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Sarah J. Zimmerman, "Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire" (Ohio UP, 2021)

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Following tirailleurs sénégalais’ deployments in West Africa, Congo, Madagascar, North Africa, Syria-Lebanon, Vietnam, and Algeria from the 1880s to 1962, Militarizing Marriage West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire (Ohio UP, 2021) historicizes how African servicemen advanced conjugal strategies with women at home and abroad. Sarah J. Zimmerman examines the evolution of women’s conjugal relationships with West African colonial soldiers to show how the sexuality, gender, and exploitation of women were fundamental to the violent colonial expansion and the everyday operation of colonial rule in modern French Empire. These conjugal behaviors became military marital traditions that normalized the intimate manifestation of colonial power in social reproduction across the empire. Soldiers’ cross-colonial and interracial households formed at the intersection of race and sexuality outside the colonizer/colonized binary. Militarizing Marriage uses contemporary feminist scholarship on militarism and violence to portray how the subjugation of women was indispensable to military conquest and colonial rule.

Sarah J. Zimmerman is an associate professor in history at Western Washington University. Her research focuses on the experiences of women and the operation of gender in West Africa and French Empire. She has published articles in the International Journal of African Historical Studies and Les Temps modernes. Zimmerman is currently Vice President of the French Colonial Historical Society and will serve as President from 2022 to 2024.

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Alex Csiszar, "The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Listen to this interview of Alex Csiszar, professor in the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University and author of The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (U Chicago Press, 2018). We talk about the British, the French, and the Germans. No joke.

Alex Csiszar : "There's this myth out there about what makes a scientist a scientist. It's that they're highly skeptical of everything. They don't believe a claim until they see it with their own eyes. But anybody who spends any kind of time in the scientific process knows this is ridiculous. Most everything that everybody believes in the sciences is stuff that they've been given to believe through reading papers, through education, through being told by their colleagues, through textbooks–––almost everything anybody in the sciences believes has come to them through trust. And the formats and genres through which a lot of that stuff comes to one's eyes matter a lot for generating that trust. Though, maybe one of the lessons of the book is that the formats and genres might matter a little less than you might at first think because there are other means, perhaps more important means, through which individuals come to trust a particular claim––and personal contacts matter a lot here. But clearly what is being discussed in a lot of the debates that I follow in this book are the means through which such trust can be established, guaranteed."

Daniel heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research.

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Jeremy Black, "France: A Short History" (Thames & Hudson, 2021)

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

A short and entertaining narrative of France from prehistory to the present, recounting the great events and personalities that helped create France’s cultural and political influence today.

Country and destination, nation and idea, France has a rich and complex history that fascinates the world and attracts millions of visitors each year to its chateaux and cathedrals, boulevards and vineyards. In this succinct and entertaining volume, Veteran historian Jeremy Black narrates how France’s past has created its distinct character and powerful artistic, intellectual, and political influence across the globe.

In France: A Short History (Thames & Hudson, 2021), Black takes readers from the cave paintings of Lascaux and the origins of Gothic architecture, to Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and the Lumiere brothers, and even into the cataclysm of the 1789 revolution, the countercultural student protests of 1968, and the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) today. His account presents a vivid take on history that emphasizes the unexpected nature of events and unpredictable outcomes of a fragmented and crisis-prone nation.

In retelling France’s story, Black explores some of its most famous philosophy, literature, art, and architecture—and ties them to the military, political, and cultural shifts that led to their development. With color illustrations, France is a short, easy-to-digest history of a vast subject, and a helpful guide to understanding France today.

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Meryl Altman, "Beauvoir in Time" (Brill, 2020)

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Meryl Altman's new book Beauvoir in Time, published by Brill Rodopi Press (2020), situates Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) in its historical context and responds to criticism that muddles what she actually said about sex, race and class. She takes up three aspects of Beauvoir's work today’s feminists find problematic: the characterizations of the frigid woman and lesbians, the analogy of race and class that obscures Black and working-class women and her examples drawn from white middle-class experience. Charged with ethnocentrism, her contribution is distorted by not considering her place and time. Through close reading of Beauvoir's writing in many genres, alongside expansive criticism, Altman shows that what appears as a problem for feminist theory is best understood by a full consideration of Beauvoir’s engagement with Freudian, Marxist and anticolonial thinkers. Extremely helpful in understanding the place of The Second Sex within international feminist theory, Altman offers insights into how Beauvoir is still relevant in the age of intersectionality and identity politics.

Meryl Altman is Professor of English and Women's Studies at DePauw University.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the intellectual history of women and the origins of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, "Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)

Thu, 22 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote that “the silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.” Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall’s Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games (University Press of Mississippi, 2021) illustrates how this holds true not just in the writing of historical narratives but also the history of film. The book shows how one of the most important revolutions in world history, a revolt in which enslaved people fought for their freedom and created the first majority Black and post-slavery republic, has been silenced, ridiculed, or whitewashed by American and European film makers. She introduces us to Haitian directors such as Raoul Peck who want to tell their own story, free of white saviors but with the full horrors of slavery. The book takes some surprising turns. It turns out video games such as Assassins’ Creed do a better job at recreating the resistance of enslaved people than most films. Sepinwall also finds an unexpected hero in comedian Chris Rock. His Top Five contains a subplot about a fictionalized version of Rock trying to promote his film about the Haitian Revolution to white journalists who can't even understand the concept of a slave revolt.

Dr. Sepinwall, who earned her doctorate at Stanford, is a professor of history at California State University San Marcos. Her previous books include The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism and Haitian History: New Perspectives. She also has a number of articles in journals and edited collections such as Journal of Modern History, Journal of Haitian Studies, Journal of American Culture, and Raoul Peck: Power, Politics, and the Cinematic Imagination. In the interests of full disclosure, she is one of my favorite collaborators and we co-edited a volume of the World History Bulletin on France in world history.

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Richard Scholar, "Émigrés: French Words That Turned English" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

English has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. French words and phrases—such as à la mode, ennui, naïveté and caprice—lend English a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that would otherwise elude the language. Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared and that now entangles English- and French-speaking cultures all over the world.

Émigrés: French Words That Turned English (Princeton UP, 2020) demonstrates that French borrowings have, over the centuries, “turned” English in more ways than one. From the seventeenth-century polymath John Evelyn’s complaint that English lacks “words that do so fully express” the French ennui and naïveté, to George W. Bush’s purported claim that “the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur,” this unique history of English argues that French words have offered more than the mere seasoning of the occasional mot juste. They have established themselves as “creolizing keywords” that both connect English speakers to—and separate them from—French. Moving from the realms of opera to ice cream, the book shows how migrant French words are never the same again for having ventured abroad, and how they complete English by reminding us that it is fundamentally incomplete.

At a moment of resurgent nationalism in the English-speaking world, Émigrés invites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe the French language and why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Nicholas Harrison, "Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education" (Liverpool UP, 2019)

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Nicholas Harrison's Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education (Liverpool UP, 2019) is a fascinating examination of colonial education not just as a facet of colonialism, but as an "example" of education in a broader sense, albeit an "extreme" one. At once a historical study, a series of close readings of texts, ideas, and authors, and a set of intellectual, professional, and political biographies, the book explores and interrogates approaches to the teaching of languages, literatures, and histories within and beyond colonial contexts.

Centering as educators writers and thinkers essential to our critical understanding of colonialism and postcolonialism literature, the book has implications for how we think about the project of education as a whole, particularly in the Humanities, and especially right now. In chapters that pursue the educational, intellectual, and teaching stories of figures like Edward Said, Mouloud Ferraoun, Assia Djebar, and Albert Memmi, Our Civilizing Mission takes up issues of power and resistance in the definition and interpretation of "canon," pedagogic philosophies and approaches within and beyond classrooms, and the complex relationships between teaching, scholarship, and politics.

Reading this book and speaking with Nick, I was surprised by how much these chapters held for me, not just as a historian and scholar of France and empire, but as a teacher of these things who regularly asks myself questions about my own choices, goals, and approaches to working with students. It is a book I would recommend enthusiastically to anyone interested in the figures mentioned above, in the role that education has played in colonialisms past and present, and in the project of education on a much wider scale. What we do as teachers, why and how we do it, is interrogated here in ways that might surprise, and will certainly enlighten.

I hope listeners will enjoy our conversation!

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Diana Seave Greenwald, "Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art (Princeton UP, 2021) presents a groundbreaking blend of art historical and social scientific methods to chart, for the first time, the sheer scale of nineteenth-century artistic production. With new quantitative evidence for more than five hundred thousand works of art, Diana Seave Greenwald provides fresh insights into the nineteenth century, and the extent to which art historians have focused on a limited—and potentially biased—sample of artwork from that time. She addresses long-standing questions about the effects of industrialization, gender, and empire on the art world, and she models more expansive approaches for studying art history in the age of the digital humanities.

Examining art in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Greenwald features datasets created from indices and exhibition catalogs that—to date—have been used primarily as finding aids. From this body of information, she reveals the importance of access to the countryside for painters showing images of nature at the Paris Salon, the ways in which time-consuming domestic responsibilities pushed women artists in the United States to work in lower-prestige genres, and how images of empire were largely absent from the walls of London’s Royal Academy at the height of British imperial power. Ultimately, Greenwald considers how many works may have been excluded from art historical inquiry and shows how data can help reintegrate them into the history of art, even after such pieces have disappeared or faded into obscurity.

Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

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Nick Lloyd, "The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918" (Liveright, 2021)

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare. In this history, military historian Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting in The Western Front: A History of the First World War (Liveright, 2021). As Lloyd reveals, far from a site of attrition and stalemate, the Western Front was dynamic and defined by extraordinary scientific and tactical innovation. It was on the Western Front that the modern technologies—machine guns, mortars, grenades, and howitzers—were refined and developed into effective killing machines. It was on the Western Front that chemical warfare, in the form of poison gas, was first unleashed. And it was on the Western Front that tanks and aircraft were introduced, causing a dramatic shift away from nineteenth-century bayonet tactics toward modern combined arms, reinforced by heavy artillery, that forever changed the face of war.

Douglas Bell received his PhD in history at Texas A&M University and was recently the Postdoctoral Fellow at the US Army Heritage an Education Center.

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Rod Phillips, "French Wine: A History" (U California Press, 2016)

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Today on New Books in History, Rod Phillips, Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, talks about his book, French Wine: A History, out in 2016 with the University of California Press, and published in paperback in 2020.

For centuries, wine has been associated with France more than with any other country. France remains one of the world’s leading wine producers by volume and enjoys unrivaled cultural recognition for its wine. If any wine regions are global household names, they are French regions such as Champagne, Bordeaux, and Burgundy. Within the wine world, products from French regions are still benchmarks for many wines.

French Wine is the first synthetic history of wine in France: from Etruscan, Greek, and Roman imports and the adoption of wine by beer-drinking Gauls to its present status within the global marketplace. Rod Phillips places the history of grape growing and winemaking in each of the country’s major regions within broad historical and cultural contexts.

Examining a range of influences on the wine industry, wine trade, and wine itself, the book explores religion, economics, politics, revolution, and war, as well as climate and vine diseases. French Wine is the essential reference on French wine for collectors, consumers, sommeliers, and industry professionals.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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B. Storey and J. Silber Storey, "Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

What makes us happy? What keeps us from being happy? Is restlessness the same thing as unhappiness? Is happiness something we should value or assume we can even find?

These are some of the questions that Benjamin and Jenna Storey explore in their 2021 book, Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (Princeton UP, 2021). They lead us through the ideas on these matters of four French-language thinkers: Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville.

The book begins by examining the relaxed view of the human condition that Montaigne (1533–1592) took that has been called his, “nonchalance.” It moves on to the stern, forbidding view of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), who felt that everyone was miserable and that it was folly to deny it and the only answer was God—and finding God was a grueling quest. They then take on Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who felt that everyone was good at heart but that society tended to stifle that goodness and deform moral character. They conclude with Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) who felt that democracy was a boon to mankind but that it could descend into tyranny if people became so obsessed with material well-being that they turned to the government at the expense of liberty.

This is only one take on the book. Read it for yourself. It profiles four thinkers who shaped Western thinking on government, religion, education, liberty, morality and our consciousnesses and the soul. It could be profitably read by teachers, parents and those who have friends who are unhappy or by readers who are themselves vaguely (or wildly) discontented. If you are a happy-go-lucky person, Montaigne is your man. If you are of the opinion that life is a grim business, go with Pascal. If you want a book that is both enjoyable and deeply serious, read this one. For once, I was convinced that French (and Swiss) thinkers matter to me as an American.

Today, we will hear from Benjamin and Jenna Storey and talk about their four featured thinkers and the long, winding path of the concept of contentment.

For more information about the book and the work of Benjamin and Jenna Story, please visit their website.

Give a listen.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

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Camille Robcis, "Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work currently living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at jmull@smith.edu.

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Philip Zelikow, "The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917" (PublicAffairs, 2021)

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

During a pivotal few months in the middle of the First World War all sides-Germany, Britain, and America-believed the war could be concluded. Peace at the end of 1916 would have saved millions of lives and changed the course of history utterly.

Two years into the most terrible conflict the world had ever known, the warring powers faced a crisis. There were no good military options. Money, men, and supplies were running short on all sides. The German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, secretly sought President Woodrow Wilson's mediation to end the war, just as British ministers and France's president also concluded that the time was right. The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917 (PublicAffairs, 2021), by renowned author and former government official, Philip Zelikow, Professor of History at the University of Virginia, describes how tantalizingly close these far-sighted statesmen came to ending the war, saving millions of lives, and avoiding the total war that dimmed hopes for a better world.

Theirs was a secret battle that is only now becoming fully understood, a story of civic courage, awful responsibility, and how some leaders rose to the occasion while others shrank from it or chased other ambitions. "Peace is on the floor waiting to be picked up!" pleaded the German ambassador to the United States. This book explains both the strategies and fumbles of people facing a great crossroads of history. Professor Zelikow, has written revisionist history at its very best: over-turning old paradigms and interpretations and offering up a new way of seeing the historical canvas.

The Road Less Traveled reveals one of the last great mysteries of the Great War: that it simply never should have lasted so long or cost so much.

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Stephen Murray, "Notre-Dame of Amiens: Life of the Gothic Cathedral" (Columbia UP, 2020)

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Notre-Dame of Amiens is one of the great Gothic cathedrals. Its construction began in 1220, and artistic production in the Gothic mode lasted well into the sixteenth century. In Notre-Dame of Amiens: Life of the Gothic Cathedral (Columbia UP, 2020), Stephen Murray invites readers to see the cathedral as more than just a thing of the past: it is a living document of medieval Christian society that endures in our own time.

Murray tells the cathedral’s story from the overlapping perspectives of the social groups connected to it, exploring the ways that the layfolk who visit the cathedral occasionally, the clergy who use it daily, and the artisans who created it have interacted with the building over the centuries. He considers the cycles of human activity around the cathedral and shows how groups of makers and users have been inextricably intertwined in collaboration and, occasionally, conflict. The book travels around and through the spaces of the cathedral, allowing us to re-create similar passages by our medieval predecessors. Murray reveals the many worlds of the cathedral and brings them together in the architectural triumph of its central space.

A beautifully illustrated account of a grand, historically and religiously important building from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of time periods, this book offers readers a memorable tour of Notre-Dame of Amiens that celebrates the cathedral’s eight hundredth anniversary.

Notre-Dame of Amiens is enhanced by high-resolution images, liturgical music, and animations embedded in an innovative website.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Elizabeth Emery, "Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France, 1853-1914" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Thu, 17 Jun 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Erin Duncan O’Neill (Assistant Professor, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Elizabeth Emery (Professor, Montclair State University) about Emery’s recent book, Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France, 1853-1914 (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Women figured prominently among the leading collectors and purveyors of Asian art in mid-nineteenth-century France, but scholars no longer recognize their influence. In her latest book, Reframing Japonisme,Elizabeth Emery asks us to consider their disappearance in light of the gendered dynamics at play in practices of artistic production and circulation of that period.

She presents a trove of materials--art objects, literary accounts, and fragmentary records scattered among diverse archives—to bring renewed attention to women’s contributions to the French discover of Japanese art and its celebration in museums, social settings, and the global art market. In this conversation, Emery and Duncan O’Neill discuss two women at the heart of her story: an avid collector, Clémence d’Ennery, and the premier importer of Asian art with a shop on the rue de Rivoli, Louse Desoye. Emery documents their art education, commercial exchanges, and intellectual legacies alongside cogent analysis of the legal, economic, and literary forces that have conspired to obscure their contributions.

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Emma Rothschild, "An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Emma Rothschild’s new book, An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries (Princeton University Press, 2021) (see the book’s accompanying website here: https://infinitehistory.org), is a beautiful work that, by following the lives of one obscure family over five generations, weaves together a history of France through the momentous revolutions and economic transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this conversation, Emma talks to Yi Ning Chang about the puzzles of writing micro-, meso-, and macrohistory, about the literary and the historical, and about what it might mean for the historian to treat every historical story as one of potentially infinite possibilities.

Marie Aymard was an illiterate widow who lived in the provincial town of Angoulême in southwestern France, a place where seemingly nothing ever happened. Yet, in 1764, she made her fleeting mark on the historical record through two documents: a power of attorney in connection with the property of her late husband, a carpenter on the island of Grenada, and a prenuptial contract for her daughter, signed by eighty-three people in Angoulême. Who was Marie Aymard? Who were all these people? And why were they together on a dark afternoon in December 1764? Beginning with these questions, An Infinite History offers a panoramic look at an extended family over five generations. Through ninety-eight connected stories about inquisitive, sociable individuals, ending with Marie Aymard’s great-great granddaughter in 1906, Emma Rothschild unfurls an innovative modern history of social and family networks, emigration, immobility, the French Revolution, and the transformation of nineteenth-century economic life.

Rothschild spins a vast narrative resembling a period novel, one that looks at a large, obscure family, of whom almost no private letters survive, whose members traveled to Syria, Mexico, and Tahiti, and whose destinies were profoundly unequal, from a seamstress living in poverty in Paris to her third cousin, the cardinal of Algiers. Rothschild not only draws on discoveries in local archives but also uses new technologies, including the visualization of social networks, large-scale searches, and groundbreaking methods of genealogical research.

An Infinite History demonstrates how the ordinary lives of one family over three centuries can constitute a remarkable record of deep social and economic changes.

Yi Ning Chang is a PhD student in political theory at the Department of Government at Harvard University. She works on the history of contemporary political thought, postcolonial theory and race, and the global histories of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism in Southeast Asia. Yi Ning can be reached at yiningchang@g.harvard.edu.

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Jurgen Martschukat, "The Age of Fitness: How the Body Came to Symbolize Success and Achievement" (Polity, 2021)

Mon, 31 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Today on New Books in History, Juergen Martschukat, professor of North American History at Universitat Erfurt, talks about his new book, The Age of Fitness: How the Body Became a Sign of Success and Performance (Polity Press, 2021), to celebrate its translation into and publication in English with Polity Press, this year, 2021. The book was originally published in 2019, by S. Fischer, in German.

We live in the age of fitness. Hundreds of thousands of people run marathons and millions go jogging in local parks, work out in gyms, cycle, swim, or practice yoga. The vast majority are not engaged in competitive sport and are not trying to win any medals. They just want to get fit. Why this modern preoccupation with fitness? In this new book, Jurgen Martschukat traces the roots of our modern preoccupation with fitness back to the birth of modern societies in the eighteenth century, showing how the idea of fitness was interwoven with modernity's emphasis on perpetual optimization and renewal. But it is only in the period since the 1970s, he argues, that the age of fitness truly emerged, as part and parcel of our contemporary neoliberal era. Neoliberalism enjoins individuals to work on themselves, to cultivate themselves in body and mind. Fitness becomes a guiding principle of social life, an era-defining network of discourses and practices that shape individuals' actions and self-conceptions. The pursuit of fitness becomes a cultural repertoire that is deeply ingrained in our institutions and way of life. This wide-ranging book shows how deeply fitness is inscribed in modern societies, and how important fitness has become to success or failure, recognition or exclusion, in a society that sets great store by self-responsibility, performance, market, and competition. It will be of great value not only to those interested in sport and fitness, but also to anyone concerned with the conditions of success and failure in our societies today.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Jeffrey Merrick, "Sodomy in Eighteenth-Century France" (Cambridge Scholars, 2020)

Mon, 24 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

We know more about men who sought and had sex with men in eighteenth-century Paris than in any other city at the time. Police records provide information about thousands of sodomites who were arrested and thousands more who were not. Michel Rey explored the sodomitical culture of the capital in five articles, based on one set of sources, published from 1982 to 1994. No one has completed his pioneering work in the archives and challenged his anachronistic conclusions about identity, community, and effeminacy. Jeffrey Merrick's book Sodomy in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge Scholars, 2020), the first on the subject based on extensive research in all of the relevant series of police records, explores patterns and changes in the lives of men who desired men and in the surveillance and punishment of same-sex relations across the century. The book examines what the extant sources do and do not tell us about the heads, hearts, and hands of men detained or mentioned by the police. To that end, it includes a generous selection of documents that allow us to hear voices from the archives, including many that require us to rethink what we thought we knew about the subculture.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Diana Souhami, "No Modernism Without Lesbians" (Head of Zeus Book, 2020)

Thu, 13 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Diana Souhami talks about her new book No Modernism Without Lesbians, out 2020 with Head of Zeus books.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Ziad Elmarsafy, "Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought: Massignon, Corbin, Jambet" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In his new book Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought: Massignon, Corbin, Jambet (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2021) Ziad Elmarsafy maps the intellectual and personal genealogies of three French specialists of Islam, Louis Massignon, Henry Corbin, and Christian Jambet and the ways in which esoteric Islam, be it Sufism, Shi‘ism and/or Islamic philosophy informed their academic projects and worldviews. The first chapter situates Massignon’s travels (i.e., Iraq) and his studies of Arabic and Sufism (especially of Mansur al-Hallaj), which defined his conceptualizations and embodiments of hospitality and desire. Massignon’s student Corbin would also turn to the traditions of Sufism, Shi‘a thought, and metaphysics to grapple with notions of vision or theophany in his intellectual work. Finally, Christian Jambet, a student of Corbin, and a Maoist atheist would turn to the revolutionary history of the Alamut and Nizari Ismailis, as well as Mulla Sadra, to think through ideas of political change, eschatology, and resurrection. Throughout these rich and detailed chapters, one finds a textured discussion of the diverse ways in which esoteric Islam defined the intellectual lives and projects of twentieth and twenty-first century France. The book will be of interest to those who think and write about esoteric Islam, Islam in the west, Islamic and French philosophy, Shi ‘ism, and Sufism.

Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier.

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Ritchie Robertson, "The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790" (Harper, 2021)

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 (Harper, 2021) is a magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness.

One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument.

Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”.

Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument.

Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.

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Fatima Shaik, "Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood" (HNOC, 2021)

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Fatima Shaik's book Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood (Historic New Orleans Collections, 2021) tells the story of the Sociâetâe d'Economie et d'Assistance Mutuelle, a New Orleans mutual aid society founded by free men of color in 1836. The group was one of the most important multiethnic, intellectual communities in the US South: educators, world-traveling merchants, soldiers, tradesmen, and poets who rejected racism and colorism to fight for suffrage and education rights for all. The author drew on the meeting minutes of the Sociâetâe d'Economie as well as census and civil records, newspapers, and numerous archival sources to write a narrative stretching from the Haitian Revolution through the early jazz age.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Roundtable on Medieval Conspiracy Theories

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Join us today for a roundtable conversation with three leading medieval scholars about the phenomenon of conspiracy theories in history.

Michael T. Bailey, professor of history at Iowa State University is one of the world’s leading scholars on the development of the idea of the Witches’ Sabbath, the verifiable hysterical historical panic about a gathering of diabolical witches joined together to dance with the devil himself in order to spread evil power, a nocturnal festival capable of destroying flora and fauna.

Miri Rubin, professor of history at Queen Mary University of London, and translator of the first Blood Libel accusation in England, speaks on her historical forte: the dangerous, long-lived, and utterly spurious assertion that Jews ritually murder a Christian child to celebrate Passover. Emerging in medieval England and flourishing throughout the whole of the premodern era, the Blood Libel was responsible for another form or murderous hysteria.

Sean Field, a specialist on religious life in medieval France, speaks about the creation of mystery around the Templars. This is a different kind of conspiracy theory, that develops later around a specific and very real event. King Philip IV of France accused the Templars of a laundry list of spiritual and corporeal crimes; almost all the accused were entirely innocent. Though there was much furor contemporaneously, there was no belief that the Templars were involved in some sort of international secret financial skullduggery. Instead that modern balderdash developed much later and sticks with us. Our conversation covers the appeal of conspiracy theories, how they gain traction, and how they might be handled. Though our discussion is based in history it has strong repercussions for the current political and cultural situation.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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William Max Nelson, "The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present.

In The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One (University of Toronto Press, 2021), William Max Nelson argues that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and build a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but fundamentally different from it. A theoretically inflected work combining intellectual history and the history of science, this book will appeal to anyone interested in European history and the history of science, as well as the history of France, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.

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Zach Sell, "Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital" (UNC Press, 2021)

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The middle decades of the 19th century witnessed the expansion of slavery and white settlement and dispossession of Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi River, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire followed by the importation of indentured laborers from India and China into the West Indies, the consolidation of British rule in India followed by the so-called Indian Mutiny, and the expansion of settler colonialism in Australia. These processes were all tied together by commerce, empire, and the spread of racial ideologies, yet their histories have largely been written separately. Until now.

Zach Sell’s new book Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) highlights the connections between the “second slavery” in the Deep South of the United States, efforts to socially engineer mono-crop agriculture in India by a British colonial state that lip service to laissez-faire and free labor even as it tried to import plantation management techniques from the US south, how the attempt to create plantation-style agriculture in Queensland, Australia bumped up against the logic of white settler colonialism and attempts to expand plantation agriculture in Belize in the age of so-called “free” labor using indentured labor from Asia. This is a story of racial formation on a global scale, and of the limits of capital’s ability to remake social relations and environments in its own image, despite the capacity for organized brutality that it had at its disposal. This book is particularly important at a time when many American, British and French commentators have tried to downplay the violence of expansion and colonialism and to portray white supremacy as some sort of American peculiarity and relic of the past.

Zach is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Drexel University and was previously Ruth J. Simmons Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavery and Justice at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

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Tyler Sonnichsen, "Capitals of Punk: DC, Paris, and Circulation in the Urban Underground" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

This one's personal.

Tyler Sonnichsen's Capitals of Punk: DC, Paris, and Circulation in the Urban Underground (Palgrave, 2019) was an amazing book for me to read and speak with its author about. While I am always fascinated by the different approaches to and thematic areas covered by the books I explore for the podcast, this one took me back to my years as a Montreal teenager, cutting my own hair, sewing my own dresses/skirts, and running around town after the loudest, fastest (sometimes angriest) music I could find. And it brings the stories of some of my favourite sounds from that era (and since) together with my love of and fascination for France and French culture. That's never happened before for me on the podcast.

Capitals of Punk looks at the movement -between France and the United States, Paris and DC- of music, people, a broader (sub)cultural phenomenon that included writing, art, ideas, an ethos for creating and living. Drawing on interviews and the extensive archives kept by musicians, promoters, and fans on both sides of the Atlantic, the book traces how the underground music scenes of these two capital cities learned from and influenced each other. A musical geography that illuminates a counterculture across spaces and times, the book will appeal to punks young and old (!), and to anyone interested in the varieties of French and American music and urban history.

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Chelsea Stieber, "Haiti's Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804-1954" (NYU Press, 2020)

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Picking up where most historians conclude, Chelsea Stieber explores the critical internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between monarchy and republic. What transpired was a war of swords and of pens, waged in newspapers and periodicals, in literature, broadsheets, and fliers.

In Haiti's Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804-1954 (NYU Press, 2020) — her analysis of Haitian writing that followed independence — Stieber composes a new literary history of Haiti, that challenges our interpretations of both freedom struggles and the postcolonial. By examining internal dissent during the revolution, Stieber reveals that the very concept of freedom was itself hotly contested in the public sphere, and it was this inherent tension that became the central battleground for the guerre de plume — the paper war — that vied to shape public sentiment and the very idea of Haiti.

Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

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Mack P. Holt, "The Politics of Wine in Early Modern France: Religion and Popular Culture in Burgundy, 1477-1630" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Todays’ guest is Mack P. Holt, Professor Emeritus of History at George Mason University in Virginia, talking about his recent book, The Politics of Wine in Early Modern France: Religion and Popular Culture in Burgundy, 1477-1630, out 2018 with Cambridge University Press.

In the late fifteenth century, Burgundy was incorporated in the kingdom of France. This, coupled with the advent of Protestantism in the early sixteenth century, opened up new avenues for participation in public life by ordinary Burgundians and led to considerably greater interaction between the elites and the ordinary people. Mack Holt examines the relationship between the ruling and popular classes from Burgundy's re-incorporation into France in 1477 until the Lanturelu riot in Dijon in 1630, focusing on the local wine industry. Indeed, the vineyard workers were crucial in turning back the tide of Protestantism in the province until 1630 when, following royal attempts to reduce the level of popular participation in public affairs, Louis XIII tried to remove them from the city altogether. More than just a local study, this book shows how the popular classes often worked together with local elites to shape policies that affected them.

This joyful conversation lingers on the delights of the archive, a variety of historical methodologies, and the contours of the historical craft.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Karl Schlögel, "The Scent of Empire: Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow" (Polity, 2021)

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Today New Books in History features Karl Schlögel, Professor Emeritus at the Europa Universitat Viadrina, Frankfort to talk about his new book, The Scent of Empires: Chanel no. 5 and Red Moscow, out this year, 2021 with Polity Press.

Can a drop of perfume tell the story of the twentieth century? Can a smell bear the traces of history? What can we learn about the history of the twentieth century by examining the fate of perfumes?

In this remarkable book, Karl Schlögel unravels the interconnected histories of two of the world’s most celebrated perfumes. In tsarist Russia, two French perfumers – Michel Beaux and Auguste Michel – developed related fragrances honouring Catherine the Great for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. During the Russian Revolution and Civil War, Beaux fled Russia and took the formula for his perfume with him to France, where he sought to adapt it to his new French circumstances. He presented Coco Chanel with a series of ten fragrance samples in his laboratory and, after smelling each, she chose number five – the scent that would later go by the name Chanel No. 5. Meanwhile, as the perfume industry was being revived in Soviet Russia, Auguste Michel used his original fragrance to create Red Moscow for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. Piecing together the intertwined histories of these two famous perfumes, which shared a common origin, Schlögel tells a surprising story of power, intrigue and betrayal that offers an altogether unique perspective on the turbulent events and high politics of the twentieth century.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Joshua Cole, "Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Joshua Cole's Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2019) appeals to a few of the different readers in my head: the one who admires a critical history interrogating archival evidence, narrative, and categories of identity; the one who enjoys a localized story that illuminates a much broader context and set of themes; and the one who is completely fascinated by a mystery.

Examining a brief, but powerful, episode of political violence in Constantine in August 1934 that resulted in the deaths of 25 Jews and 3 Muslims, the book reveals fissures within colonial society in Algeria that French authorities had a vested interest in provoking and nurturing. The particular conflict that pitted Muslims against Jews with such intensity over the course of a few days during the interwar period gave the French state an opportunity to fuel tensions between these communities in order to resist political reforms extending key rights of citizenship to Muslims in Algeria.

The book also makes the compelling case that a particular figure, Mohamed El Maadi, a Muslim Algerian who served in the French military and developed ties to extreme-right politics, played a key role in the conflict, including planning and participating in the murders. Beyond the revelation of a principal culprit during the episode, Lethal Provocation also tracks the ways the French authorities, including the police and other segments of the colonial state refused to understand the riots and murders as anything other than the expression of an inherent and essential rift between Jews and Muslims. Reframing the Constantine murders, a tragic and violent set of events that took place in 1930s Algeria, the book also makes clear that the riots are/were also en episode of a very French history.

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S. Palombarin and B. Amable, "The Last Neoliberal: Macron and the Origins of France's Political Crisis" (Verso, 2021)

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Emmanuel Macron “has shown a genuine ability to strategize politically, determinedly and clear-sightedly [in] occupying the space of the bourgeois bloc. This is a space that France’s political crisis has left open for many years but that no one before him had been able to identify and represent effectively”.

So say Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini in The Last Neoliberal: Macron and the Origins of France's Political Crisis (Verso Books, 2021).

For three decades, the French centre-left has tried and failed to hang on to a working-class base with socialist platforms while, at the same time, appealing to the same demographic as its leadership: metropolitan, liberal and with an unbreakable core commitment to European intregration.

In 2017, Macron abandoned this effort and went straight for the “bourgeois” core of 20-25% of the electorate with the aim of building out into the traditional right in time for the April 2022 election.

Bruno Amable is a professor of economics at the University of Geneva and was previously a professor at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, an associate member of the Paris School of Economics, and research fellow with CEPREMAP.

*The author's own book recommendation is Techno-féodalisme: Critique de l'économie numérique by Cédric Durand (Éditions Zones, 2020)

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.

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Philip Mansel, "King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV" (U of Chicago Press, 2019).

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Philip Mansel, a trustee of the Society for Court Studies and President of the Research Center of the Chateau de Versailles, has written a one-volume biography of the life and times of Louis XIV, King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV (The University of Chicago Press, 2019).

One of the longest reigning monarchs in Europe’s history, from 1643 to 1715, Louis XIV left a mark upon France for good and ill. He expanded the country’s borders but left it in horrible financial shape. He was a valuable patron of the arts and architecture, but wreaked havoc on some of his nation’s citizens, especially French Protestants.

He reaped the glory associated with imperial policy and dynastic intermarriages throughout Europe, but brought destruction to the lives, fortunes, and cities of his enemies. Mansel brings the court of Louis XIV alive, paying special attention to the daily personal life of the king and his associates. He reviews France’s effects on the politics of Europe and provides a detailed history of the key project of Louis’ life: the palace of Versailles.

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Augustin Jomier, "Islam, réforme et colonisation: une histoire de l'ibadisme en Algérie (1882-1962)" (Sorbonne, 2020)

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 05:00:00 -0000

Islam, réforme et colonisation: une histoire de l'ibadisme en Algérie (1882-1962) by Augustin Jomier is an important study of colonial North Africa, Islamic reform, and Ibadi Islam. Jomier, a professor at France’s Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris, has reframed the history of colonial Algeria by examining it “from the south.” His focus is the Mzab, a region based around seven oasis towns in the northern Sahara 600 km away from the capital city. The Mzabis on whom Jomier concentrates are a linguistic and religious minority in Algeria, speaking a Berber language and practicing Ibadi Islam both of which distinguish them from the Arabic-speaking, Sunni majority. By grounding his study not only in colonial archives but also sources from the Mzab—where he conducted extensive fieldwork—Jomier intervenes in historiographical debates pertaining to the Mzab and far beyond. The book is not only a landmark study of reform outside of the Sunni perspective, it also elucidates the limits of reform, the opposition to reformists, and the role of orientalist discourses and an emergent public sphere.

Julian Weideman is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University.

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Jillian C. Rogers, "Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Understanding how people cope with large-scale traumatic events has become more urgent as we continue to cope with the effects of the pandemic. In Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars (Oxford University Press, 2021), Jillian Rogers examines France in the aftermath of World War I, which left its residents mourning a lost generation and many soldiers suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder.

Through analysis of French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, as well as music and archival materials, Rogers argues that music was a significant method that French people used to manage and perform trauma. Employing innovative analytical techniques, Rogers shows that stylistic developments in post-war French music may have been responses to trauma suffered by the composers. As a consolatory practice, French performers used music to remember loved ones but also to sooth themselves through the repetitive bodily movements required to play neoclassical music. By interpreting French modernist music as a therapeutic medium Rogers demonstrates the importance of addressing trauma, mourning, and people's emotional lives in music scholarship.

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Steven Press, "Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe's Scramble for Africa" (Harvard UP, 2017)

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Steven Press is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. His marvelous first book, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa (Harvard University Press, 2017), is an incredibly well-documented monograph that follows a paper trail of questionable treaties to discover the rogues or confidence men whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s. Dr. Press shows in captivating detail how private European businessmen and firms produced hundreds of deeds purporting to buy political rights from indigenous African leaders whose understanding of these agreements was usually deemed irrelevant. A system of privately governed empires, some spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles, promptly sprang up in the heart of Africa. These experiments in governance quickly attracted notice in European capitals. The book portrays how the whole dubious enterprise came to a head at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when international diplomacy embraced rogue empires as legal precedents for new colonial agendas, opening up a host of dilemmas about the nature of modern statehood and sovereignty.

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

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Jason Berry, "City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300" (UNC Press, 2018)

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Jason Berry delivers a history of New Orleans at its tricentennial. Beyond its ancient streets, jazz, and Carnival lies a richer, more textured New Orleans than anyone imagined. Berry spotlights the tension between a culture of spectacle, rooted in African burial dances, and a city of laws anchored in white supremacy. Discussing how culture and law grind against each other, the narrative is a parade of New Orleanians faced with these tensions.

Learn more about the forthcoming documentary City of a Million Dreams here.

Jason Berry is an independent writer, documentary film producer, and journalist living in New Orleans.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

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Oliver Gloag, "Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Albert Camus, one of the most famous French philosophers and novelists, has a diverse fan base. British alternative rockers The Cure sang about The Stranger in their first big hit, “Killing an Arab”, released in 1980. George W. Bush announced that the novel was his summer reading in 2006 (considering the book’s central plot point and what he had unleashed in Iraq, this raised a few eyebrows). In 2009 there was a call to move his remains to the Pantheon. Camus’ concept of the “absurd” continues to resonant with those alienated by late capitalism and The Myth of Sisyphus is regularly invoked by faculty members dealing with university bureaucracies.

But few critics properly place Camus and his work in the context of French colonialism. Born in Algeria to an impoverished pied-noir family, he was quite the outsider (dare we say “étranger”?) to the privileged world of French letters. Once a member of the Communist Party, he became a staunch critic of Stalinism and groupthink. When Camus dared to break ranks with the orthodoxy of the Latin Quarter, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Francis Jeanson, and others turned on him. Despite winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, his reputation was further tarnished as he struggled to come to terms with the Algerian war for independence. When he died an “absurd” death in a car accident in 1960, his closest associates suppressed the pro-colonial manuscript found in the wreckage. For several decades, Camus was not a central figure in French letters. Yet, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the decline of Sartre’s influence there was a Camus revival. Now he has the posthumous stature of a fallen rock-star.

Camus and his legacy are obviously complex. Fortunately, Oliver Gloag’s Albert Camus: A Very Brief Introduction (Oxford UP, 2020) offer a concise yet nuanced account of his life and his work. Gloag excels at making Camus’ complicated philosophy accessible, and he successfully contextualizes the author as a settler colonist torn between justice and love of the country of his birth.

Oliver Gloag is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literature at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. He was educated at Columbia University, Tulane University (J.D.), and Duke University (Ph.D.); he specializes in francophone and postcolonial literature, twentieth century French literature, and cultural history. He has published on Sartre and Camus and contributed to The Sartrean Mind. He is the author of Oublier Camus, a forthcoming book on the ideological and political claiming of Camus in contemporary France. His essay “The Colonial Contradictions of Albert Camus” on Camus were featured in Jacobin.

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Robin Mitchell, "Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France" (U Georgia Press, 2020)

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

The preface to Robin Mitchell's new book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020) moves me. In it, the author tells the story of her first research trip to Paris and the profound moment of her encounter with a plaster cast of Sarah Baartman's body at the Musée de l'Homme. It is riveting, personal, and honest, the perfect entry into a book that is all of these things. Exploring the cultural production of French representations of three extraordinary Black women (Baartman, Ourika, and Jeanne Duval), the book interrogates the visual and literary imaginaries that white French men and women developed in relationship to these women's lives and bodies.

Subjected to a perverse "scientific" fascination, Baartman's body became "famous" throughout and beyond France as white gazes and fantasies sexualized and pathologized her for years until she died. Brought to France from Senegal by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, Ourika became the subject of what Mitchell characterizes as a cultural consumptive "mania" that both emulated and rejected her story and the possibilities of her "Frenchness". The lover and common law wife of poet Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval lived an entire life in France, but could never be "French enough." Marked and minoritized by their racial difference, all three women became sites of fixation and memory for a white population seeking/needing constant shoring up of their gendered and racialized identities, and a society haunted by loss and defeat in the wake of the Haitian Revolution.

The book is so beautiful, so clearly written, so overflowing with injustice, meaning, and feeling. And Mitchell's voice is there throughout, finding and honouring the voices and lives of these women. It is a book for everyone.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’ appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads on the unceded traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) peoples known as Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Jean Casimir. "The Haitians: A Decolonial History" (UNC Press, 2020)

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In The Haitians: A Decolonial History (UNC Press, 2020), leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the U.S. occupation in 1915. The Haitians (UNC Press, 2020) also critically retheorizes the very nature of slavery, colonialism, and sovereignty. Here, Casimir centers the perspectives of Haiti's moun andeyo--the largely African-descended rural peasantry. Asking how these systematically marginalized and silenced people survived in the face of almost complete political disenfranchisement, Casimir identifies what he calls a counter-plantation system. Derived from Caribbean political and cultural practices, the counter-plantation encompassed consistent reliance on small-scale landholding. Casimir shows how lakou, small plots of land often inhabited by generations of the same family, were and continue to be sites of resistance even in the face of structural disadvantages originating in colonial times, some of which continue to be maintained by the Haitian government with support from outside powers.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Kiran Klaus Patel, "Project Europe: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Project Europe made waves when it was published in German in 2018 (CH Beck) and was soon translated into English as Project Europe: A History (Cambridge UP, 2020).

A clue to its crossover appeal can be found in its original subtitle: "A Critical History." Avoiding the traps of euro-'Whig' or eurosceptical histories, Patel rethinks the development of the European Communities and the European Union from first principles.

He concludes that they were just one model among many postwar associations but proved the most evolutionarily fit; that they benefited from peace more than they contributed to it; and that "disintegration and dysfunctionality" were embedded in their design.

Having taught at Maastricht University and at the European University Institute in Florence, Kiran Klaus Patel is now professor of European history at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich.

*Patel's book recommendation is The Capital by Robert Menasse (MacLehose Press, 2019).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.

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Nimisha Barton, "Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

On today’s New Books in History, we sit down with Dr. Nimisha Barton to discuss her new book, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France (Cornell University Press, 2020). This conversation is a perfect supplemental teaching tool to assign a class reading Reproductive Citizens as is the impressive digital appendices that Dr. Barton created to accompany her work. Building on the massive amount of primary and secondary source material that Dr. Barton examined during research, she built a digital repository and archive for students and researchers to use. Included in these appendices are statistics on foreigners in France and descriptions of sources as well as methodologies. A testament to Dr. Barton’s commitment to diversity and accessibility in education, she provides this resource free to all in the hopes that students and researchers studying women, gender, sexuality, and/or migration can benefit from them. To learn more, please visit this website.

About Reproductive Citizens: In the familiar tale of mass migration to France from 1880 onwards, we know very little about the hundreds of thousands of women who formed a critical part of those migration waves. In Reproductive Citizens, Nimisha Barton argues that their relative occlusion in the historical record hints at a larger and more problematic oversight: the role of sex and gender in shaping the experiences of migrants to France before the Second World War. Barton's compelling history of social citizenship demonstrates how, through the routine application of social policies, state and social actors worked separately towards a shared goal: repopulating France with immigrant families. Filled with voices gleaned from census reports, municipal statistics, naturalization dossiers, court cases, police files, and social worker registers, Reproductive Citizens shows how France welcomed foreign-born men and women, mobilizing naturalization, family law, social policy, and welfare assistance to ensure they would procreate, bearing French-assimilated children.

Barton concludes that, in return for generous social provisions and refuge in dark times, immigrants joined the French nation through marriage and reproduction, breadwinning and child-rearing—in short, through families and family-making—which made them more French than even formal citizenship status could.

Julia Gossard is an Assistant Professor of History, Utah State University.

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S. Burrows and G. Roe, "Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of 18th-Century Studies" (Liverpool UP, 2020)

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of 18th-Century Studies (Liverpool UP, 2020) explores how a set of inter-related digital projects are transforming our vision of the Enlightenment. The featured projects are some of the best known, well-funded and longest established research initiatives in the emerging area of ‘digital humanities’, a field that has, particularly since 2010, been attracting a rising tide of interest from professional academics, the media, funding councils, and the general public worldwide. Advocates and practitioners of the digital humanities argue that computational methods can fundamentally transform our ability to answer some of the ‘big questions’ that drive humanities research, allowing us to see patterns and relationships that were hitherto hard to discern, and to pinpoint, visualise, and analyse relevant data in efficient and powerful new ways.

In the book’s opening section, leading scholars outline their own projects’ institutional and intellectual histories, the techniques and methodologies they specifically developed, the sometimes-painful lessons learned in the process, future trajectories for their research, and how their findings are revising previous understandings. A second section features chapters from early career scholars working at the intersection of digital methods and Enlightenment studies, an intellectual space largely forged by the projects featured in part one.

Highlighting current and future research methods and directions for digital eighteenth-century studies, the book offers a monument to the current state of digital work, an overview of current findings, and a vision statement for future research.

Simon Burrows is a Professor of History and Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University, Australia, where he is Leader of the Digital Humanities Research Group.

Glenn Roe is Professor of French Literature and Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Letters at Sorbonne University, where he teaches into the UFR of French and Comparative Literature and is attached to the Centre d’étude de la langue et des littératures françaises (CELLF UMR 8599) and the LabEx OBVIL.

Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London.

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Betty Rojtman, "The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought: A Longing for the Abyss (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) analyses a cultural phenomenon that goes to the very roots of Western civilization: the centrality of death in our sense of human existence. It does so through a close reading of seminal works by the most creative authors of modern French thought, such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. These works encode an entire ethics of postmodernism.

Betty Rojtman offers the reader a prism through which to see anew the key issues of the twentieth century: tragedy, finitude, nothingness—but also contestation, liberty, and sovereignty. Little by little we understand that this fascination with death may be just the other side of humankind’s great protest, its thirst for the infinite and its desire to be.

Finally, Rojtman tries to offer another view on these fundamental questions by shifting to a parallel cultural reference: Kabbalah.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Niklas Frykman, "The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution" (U California Press, 2020)

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

The 1790s were a decade of turmoil and strife across the West. With the French Revolution, a new era of wars began that invoked the language of equal rights. In The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution (University of California Press, 2020), Niklas Frykman recounts how these two factors combined to shape the mutinies that took place throughout the era. As he explains, recruiting crews for the navies of the era was typically a coercive process, one that took sailors away from more remunerative work in the merchant marine. Crowded aboard wooden warships, these men were often discontent and receptive to the idea of a more democratic process for governing ship life. This radical vision was reflected in the demands made by sailors when they mutinied and by the alternate forms of management they adopted. Such mutinies jeopardized operations in navies throughout Europe, until the growing influence of nationalism helped to counteract the influence of the transnational “maritime republic.”

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Dónal Hassett, "Mobilizing Memory: The Great War and the Language of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918-1939" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Dónal Hassett’s Mobilizing Memory: The Great War and the Language of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918-1939 (Oxford UP, 2019) is at once a history of colonialism and of the “Great War”. Considering the ways that the conflict from 1914-1918 shaped the colonial politics of the “interwar” years in the Algerian context, the book looks at how segments of Algerian society with differing interests, including European settlers and indigenous Algerians, responded to the war, trading in its effects and meanings while seeking forms of political change. According to Hassett, a “wartime moral economy of sacrifice” became an essential referent for differing political groups in the years after 1918. While European veterans and others insisted on the distinctiveness of their own contributions and rights with respect to the majority of Algerians, indigenous Algerians also made claims against the colonial state on the basis of their service to the nation and empire.

The book explores the experiences and political aims of key constituencies throughout Algerian society, including: socialists and trade unionists; European and Algerian veterans; and even the Algerian widows and orphans who petitioned for pensions and forms of recognition based on their families’ sacrifices during the war. Hassett also attends to the complexities of a political spectrum that included movements on the extreme Right, Algerian political groups seeking reform such as the rights of French citizenship with a colonial framework, and Algerian nationalists who, understanding the participation of Algerians in the Great War as a betrayal, rejected colonial domination outright. Contributing to broader scholarly conversations about the nature of colonial Algerian society and the impact of the First World War, Mobilizing Memory makes it clear that we cannot understand properly the histories of either of these historical phenomena without considering their imbrication with one another.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’ appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Judith G. Coffin, "Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

When Judith G. Coffin discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from Beauvoir's international readers, it inspired Coffin to explore the intimate bond between the famed author and her reading public. This correspondence, at the heart of Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir (Cornell UP, 2020), immerses us in the tumultuous decades from the late 1940s to the 1970s—from the painful aftermath of World War II to the horror and shame of French colonial brutality in Algeria and through the dilemmas and exhilarations of the early gay liberation and feminist movements. The letters also provide a glimpse into the power of reading and the power of readers to seduce their favorite authors. Sex, Love, and Letters lays bare the private lives and political emotions of the letter writers and of Beauvoir herself. Her readers did not simply pen fan letters but, as Coffin shows, engaged in a dialogue that revealed intellectual and literary life to be a joint and collaborative production. "This must happen to you often, doesn't it?" wrote one. "That people write to you and tell you about their lives?"

Judith G. Coffin is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches modern European history, including courses on the French Revolution, World Wars 1 and 2, Postwar Europe as well as courses on gender and sexuality. She has written The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades (Princeton UP, 1996), the modern half of W.W. Norton’s Western Civilizations (New York, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2011) and a series of articles from her book. “Historicizing The Second Sex,” French Politics, Culture & Society 25, 3 (Winter 2007); “Beauvoir, Kinsey, and Mid-Century Sex,” French Politics, Culture, and Society 28, 2 (summer, 2010); “Opinion and Desire: Polling Women in Postwar France” in Kerstin Bruckweh, ed. The Voice of the Citizen Consumer (Oxford University Press, 2011); and "Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir," American Historical Review October, 2010. She is also writing about the histories of psychoanalysis and radio (“The Adventure of the Interior: Menie Grégoire’s Radio Broadcasts.”), and has taught graduate classes in the history of radio, publicity, and privacy.

She lived three years in Paris, got her PhD at Yale, taught at Harvard and UC Riverside; she's been a fellow at NYU and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; her husband is Professor and Dean for Research at the UT School of Law; her children are in their twenties, and she is happiest in the winter in Austin and when visiting the Hill Country.

Julia Gossard is Assistant Professor of History at Utah State University and learned quite a bit about gender, psychoanalysis, and feminist studies from Judy as a student at UT-Austin

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Julie Hardwick, "Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Young women and men sought out each other’s company in the workshops, cabarets, and streets of Old Regime Lyon, and evidence of these relationships lingers in documents and material objects conserved in Lyon’s municipal and departmental archives. How did young workers spend time together? When would they initiate sexual relationships outside of marriage? What resources did they marshal to manage pregnancy and childbirth, and what kind of support might they expect from their neighbors, employers, and families? In paternity suits, young women provided direct answers to these questions, and left an incomparable archive testifying to their desires, hopes, loss, and often, grief resulting from “courtships gone awry.”

Today I spoke with Julie Hardwick about her new book Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789 (Oxford UP, 2020). Hardwick is the John E. Green Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Hardwick’s previous books include Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economy of Everyday Life in Early Modern France (2009) and The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (1998).

Jennifer J. Davis is Co-Editor, Journal of Women’s History and Associate Professor, University of Oklahoma.

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Patrick Ffrench, "Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics (Bloomsbury) is a book by Patrick Ffrench, Professor of French at Kings College.

It is a comprehensively researched and finely argued book that traces Barthes engagement with questions of cinema from early research pre-dating the publication of Mythologies to his last work, Camera Lucida, along the way responding in depth to those who have explicitly commented on Barthes musings on film and those who have been inspired by them in their own work.

It demonstrates how certain critical and theoretical themes regarding the cinema emerge and develop through the course of Barthes’ career and argues for the singular importance of the famous critic’s writing on film, despite, perhaps even precisely because of the deep ambivalence that he sustained towards that object from beginning to end.

For me, Ffrench’s book reads as a celebration of the critical virtue of ambivalence as it is played out in Barthes’ writing, showing how his apparent inability to adopt an unequivocal attitude towards film as an institution and form of expression allowed him to articulate perspectives on the nature and possibilities of cinema that still feel subtle and surprising.

Bill Schaffer is a semi-retired lecturer in Film Studies.

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Pernille Røge, "Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa c. 1750-1802" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In her new book, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802 (Cambridge UP, 2020), Dr. Pernille Røge charts the confluence and reciprocal impacts of ideas and policies espoused by political economists, colonial administrators, planters, and entrepreneurs to reform the French empire in the second half of the eighteenth century. Due to this diffusion of observations and ideas, French economic philosophers who called themselves “economistes” and later “physiocrats” were able to formulate and advocated for new French colonial doctrines that emphasized agricultural development, free labor, commercial liberalization, and colonial economic and legal integration during and after the Seven Years War (1756-1763). While meeting initial resistance, such reform efforts inspired many imperial agendas enacted by French Revolutionary leaders as well as those by subsequent French imperialists. Deeply researched from records from three continents, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire offers an enlightening perspective on critical French Atlantic political-economic development and imperial reformulation, with intellectual, economic, and political relevance that last till this day.

Dr. Pernille Røge is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and the convener of Pitt’s Early Modern Worlds Initiative.

Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic word.

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Rachel Mesch, "Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France" (Stanford UP, 2020)

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press), Rachel Mesch reads the biographies and work of three writers who did not conform to the gender norms of the period. In different ways, Jane Dieulafoy (1850–1916), Rachilde (1860–1953), and Marc de Montifaud (1845–1912) lived and wrote gender stories that challenged prevailing notions of masculinity and femininity, claiming and writing identities that complicated existing binaries and conventions.

All three of the writers Mesch examines pushed boundaries in their private and public ways of being and in their self-presentation. An archaeologist, Dieulafoy fought in the Franco-Prussian War and traveled to Persia to study the ancient city of Susa. Rachilde wrote erotic novels including the ‘scandalous’ Monsieur Vénus. An art critic, Montifaud published erotic literature that shocked the sensibilities of the time.

Thinking about these figures individually and together, Before Trans considers their non-conformity at a moment that held limited possibilities for the expression of a diversity of gender and sexual identities. The book offers so much, as a history of these important figures of nineteenth-century French literary and cultural life, and as a contribution to the exciting and growing field of trans scholarship.

Rachel Mesch is Professor of French and English at Yeshiva University.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’ appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Dan Edelstein, "On the Spirit of Rights" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures?

In On the Spirit of Rights (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others, who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, On the Spirit of Rights is a sweeping tour through centuries of European intellectual history and an essential guide to our ways of thinking about human rights today.

Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French and (by courtesy) professor of history at Stanford University. He is the author of The Terror of Natural Right, The Enlightenment, and On the Spirit of Rights, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London.

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William G. Pooley, "Body and Tradition in 19th-Century France: Félix Arnaudin and the Moorlands of Gascony, 1870-1914" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

William G. Pooley, Lecturer in Modern European History, University of Bristol is a historian of France in the long nineteenth century, interested in popular and folk cultures.

Rachel Hopkin PhD is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio produce.

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Annette Joseph-Gabriel, "Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire" (Illinois UP, 2020)

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

‘Where were the women?’ was the big question that led Annette Joseph-Gabriel to her new book, Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (University of Illinois Press, 2020).

This ‘where’ ended up meaning different things as she tracked the lives, ideas, and roles played by Black women during the era of decolonization. The ‘where’ in the final project is sometimes geographic, moving through and across spaces in the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe, and Africa. It also speaks to spaces of activism and writing, including politics, literature, and private correspondence.

The seven women that Joseph-Gabriel’s book follows—Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita, and Eslanda Robeson—make up a transnational force and network throughout, illuminating the ways women moved physically, politically, intellectually, and creatively while also showing the places where their worlds and thoughts intersected.

Centering the experiences and stories of Black women as ‘political protagonists,’ the book considers questions of race, gender, and political agency. It also pays close attention the multiplicity of possible futures that these women envisioned and sought to bring about through their anti-colonial activism.

Reimagining Liberation examines closely the citizenship demands and challenges made by these women whose contributions during this transformative period in the history of empire have been relatively neglected. While all of these women led impressive lives, some were connected to very famous men (Aimé Césaire, Félix Eboué, or Paul Robeson, for example) and issues of visibility and legibility in terms of sources and biographies run throughout the book’s chapters.

Reimagining Liberation is a fascinating collection of pathways and ideas that resonates in very particular ways in 2020, a moment of global crisis and protest around issues of racial inequality and violence. It was a true pleasure to speak with Annette about this important work and these issues at such a pivotal time.

Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel is an assistant professor of French at University of Michigan.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’ appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Patrice Gueniffey, "Napoleon and de Gaulle: Heroes and History" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

One of France’s most famous historians compares and contrasts the two most famous French exemplars of political and military leadership of the past two-hundred and fifty years to make the case that individuals, for better and worse, matter in history.

Historians have tried to teach us that the historical past is not just a narrative of heroes and wars. The anonymous millions they like to argue also matter and are active agents of change. But in erroneously democratizing history, we – they have lost track of the outsized, indeed stupendous role that individuals can and play in shaping world historical events. In his new book Napoleon and de Gaulle: Heroes and History (Harvard University Press, 2020), Professor Patrice Gueniffey provides us with a compelling reminder of the importance of heroes in history, in this powerful dual biography of two transformative leaders, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle.

Both became national figures at times of crisis and war. They were hailed as saviors and were eager to embrace the label. They were also animated by quests for personal and national greatness, by the desire to raise France above itself and lead it on a mission to enlighten the world. Both united an embattled nation, returned it to dignity, and left a permanent political legacy—in Napoleon’s case, a form of administration and a body of civil law; in de Gaulle’s case, new political institutions. Professor Gueniffey compares Napoleon’s and de Gaulle’s journeys to power; their methods; their ideas and writings, notably about war; and their postmortem reputations. He also contrasts their weaknesses: Napoleon’s limitless ambitions and appetite for war and de Gaulle’s capacity for cruelty and cynicism, manifested most clearly in relations to the end of the war in Algeria.

They were men of genuine talent and achievement, with flaws almost as pronounced as their strengths. As many nations, not least France, struggle to find their soul in a rapidly changing world, Gueniffey shows us what a difference an extraordinary leader can make. Patrice Gueniffey is Director of the Raymond Aron Center for Political Research at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. One of France’s leading historians of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic ages, he is the author of Bonaparte, the monumental first volume of the definitive modern French biography of Napoleon.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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Greg Beckett, "There is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince" (U California Press, 2019)

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In today’s episode, I talk with Dr. Greg Beckett, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western University, about his richly grounded book There is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince (2019, University of California Press – and it is coming out in a paperback edition this November). This book is an examination of “crisis” in Haiti, and pushes back against the widespread racist idea that Haiti is inherently lawless by showing the ongoing production of disorder, the scripting of crisis, and the concatenation of disaster. Theoretically, the book adds nuance to ‘crisis’ as an analytic frame, showing how crisis endures, rather than being something that occurs in between two otherwise stable periods of social life. Importantly, the book foregrounds how crisis feels, and Beckett positions his interlocutors as theorists of Haitian crisis. Today’s conversation covers recognizing your interlocutors as theorists, rather than data; how to understand the seemingly oxymoronic “forever crisis”; the politics of genre; and dealing with ethnographic trauma. (Bonus content: the post-quarantine resurgence of Mexico City’s traffic and some cute birds).

Dr. Beckett completed a MA in anthropology at Western University, and an MA and PhD in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, and prior to joining the faculty at Western, he taught at Bowdoin College in Maine. He is on Twitter @GregBeckett9.

Lachlan Summers is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. He is based in Mexico City and he researches the city’s repeating earthquakes. He is a contributing editor at Cultural Anthropology, a member of the Emergent Futures CoLab (https://www.urgentemergent.org/), and can be found on Twitter @backup_sandwich. He and his friends were permanently fired from teaching at UC Santa Cruz for participating in the wildcat strike of 2019-2020, but he hopes we can all get our jobs back soon.

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Linda Goddard, "Savage Tales: The Writings of Paul Gauguin" (Yale UP, 2019)

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In Savage Tales: The Writings of Paul Gauguin (Yale University Press, 2019), Linda Goddard investigates the role that Paul Gauguin’s writings played in his artistic practice and in his negotiation of his colonial identity.

As a French artist who lived in Polynesia, Gauguin occupies a crucial position in histories of European primitivism, but this is the first book to be devoted to his wide-ranging literary output, including his journalism, travel writing, art criticism, and essays on aesthetics, religion, and politics.

In the book, Dr. Goddard analyzes what are often richly illustrated manuscripts and she counters the tendency to interpret these writings merely as a source of information about his life. Instead, she reveals how the seemingly haphazard structure of Gauguin’s manuscripts were an important part of an artistic practice that ranged across media, one that enabled him to evoke the “primitive” culture that he so celebrated.

This critical analysis of his writings significantly enriches our understanding of the complexities of artistic encounters in the French colonial context.

Linda Goddard is senior lecturer in art history at the University of St. Andrews.

Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

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Sophie White, "Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2019)

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In her prize-winning study Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Colonial Louisiana (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2019), award-winning historian Sophie White (Professor of American Studies, Africana Studies, History, and Gender Studies, and Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame) beautifully brings to life the lives and experiences of a number of enslaved women and men whose individual stories have heretofore never been told. In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded.

Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of the Enslaved draws us into Louisiana’s courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labor, to violence, and, above all, to the intimate romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect. Their words--punctuated by the cadences of Creole and rich with metaphor--produced riveting autobiographical narratives as they veered from the questions posed by interrogators.

Carefully assessing what we can discover, what we might guess, and what has been lost forever, Sophie White offers both a richly textured account of slavery in French Louisiana and a powerful meditation on the limits and possibilities of the archive.

Awards and Distinctions for Voices of the Enslaved:

2019 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History, The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association
Co-Winner of the 2020 Summerlee Book Prize, Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast at Lamar University
Honorable Mention, 2020 Merle Curti Social History Award, Organization of American Historians

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick studying eighteenth and nineteenth century African American women’s history, slavery and emancipation in colonial America and the Atlantic world, and the history of slavery and capitalism. Follow him on Twitter @Jerrad_Pacatte!

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Laurie M. Wood, "Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire" (Yale UP, 2020)

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Historians have long treated the Atlantic and Indian Ocean routes of early modern French empire separately. But, early modern people understood France as a bi-oceanic empire, connected by vast but strong pathways of commercial, intellectual, and legal exchange. Laurie M. Wood’s Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire (Yale UP, 2020) recasts our view of France’s empire by evaluating the interwoven trajectories of the people, like itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistrates, who built France’s first empire in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in the long eighteenth century. Imperial subjects like these sought political and legal influence via law courts, with strategies that reflected local and regional priorities, especially in regards to slavery, war, and trade. Courts became liaisons between France and new colonial possessions.

Byline: Dr. Julia M. Gossard is assistant professor of history and distinguished assistant professor of honor’s education at Utah State University. A historian of 18th-century France, Julia’s manuscript, Young Subjects, examines children as important actors in social reform, state-building, and imperial projects across the early modern French world. Dr. Gossard is active on Twitter. To learn more about her teaching, research, and experience in digital humanities, visit her website.

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Richard Carswell, "The Fall of France in the Second World War: History and Memory" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

This fascinating book by Richard Carswell looks at how the fall of France in the Second World War has been recorded by historians and remembered within French society. The Fall of France in the Second World War: History and Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) argues that explanations of the 'debacle' have usually revolved around the four main themes of decadence, failure, constraint and contingency. It shows that the dominant explanation claimed for many years that the fall was the inevitable consequence of a society grown rotten in the inter-war period. This view has been largely replaced among academic historians by a sizable consensus that distinguishes between the military defeat and the political demise of the Third Republic. It emphasizes the various contingent factors that led to the military defeat of French forces by the Germans. At the same time seeks to understand the constraints within which France’s policy-makers were required to act and the reasons for their policy-making failures in economics, defence and diplomacy. This book makes for most interesting reading for both the academic world and for the lay-educated reader and university student.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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Why Did the Allies Win World War One?

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The Great War was perhaps the greatest single upheaval of the 20th century. While World War II saw more lives lost, in terms of the shock to European/Western civilization, the Great War was a more horrendous event. Perhaps nothing was as unexpected in this conflict as the sudden termination of the same in November 1918. From that time to this, historians have been considering why Germany and its allies decided to terminate the conflict when they did. Here to consider the matter once again, in this newest episode of Arguing History is Professor of History Emeritus Jeremy Black and Dr. Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society.

Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Exeter. And a Senior Associate at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge with a First, he is the author of well over one-hundred books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement.”

Dr. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)

Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.

John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd.

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Kevin Duong, "The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 26 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Kevin Duong, a political theorist in the Politics Department at the University of Virginia, has written a fascinating analysis of the way that violence has been used, in a sense, to create or promote solidarity during the course of the “long nineteenth century” in France. Duong explores four separate periods and experiences in France, starting with the French Revolution and the trial of Louis XVI, moving to the long military engagement in Algeria, then to the Paris Commune in later half of the century, and finally to the preparations and the run up to World War I. And while The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France (Oxford University Press, 2020) is about the French engagement with violence, it is a much broader analysis of the role that violence plays, particularly the concept of redemptive violence, in constructing democracy and establishing a cohesive social body among the citizenry.

Duong makes a complex and important argument that the establishment of democracy is built on an often-violent overthrow of an old order, and instead of the move from the state of nature that social contract theorists like Hobbes and Locke argue for in their texts, the democratic state comes into existence not in the welcome transition from the cruelty of the state of nature, but in the violent convulsions of bloody revolution more like the French experience. In order to create a democratic people, violence is often implemented as the means to pulling people together, and it is a kind of collective violence. Duong’s analysis posits that modern society is held together by social cohesion, which comes out of unifying violent experiences that bring people together. While mass violence is often associated with anarchy and disorder, The Virtue of Violence makes a different case, compelling us to consider how violence solves a kind of social solidarity problem, and is a means of knitting together potentially disparate members of society. While this is a book that explores the French experience, France provides the case studies to consider how violence works constructively within democratic thought, and, how redemptive violence has a kind of revitalizing power in these political contexts.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

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Adrian Johnston, "Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy " (Northwestern UP, 2013)

Mon, 11 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In the contemporary philosophical landscape, a variety of materialist ontologies have appeared, all wrestling with various political and philosophical questions in light of a post-God ontology. Entering into this discussion is Adrian Johnston, with his 3-volume Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, an attempt to develop a systematic and thoroughly atheistic material ontology of the subject. The first volume, subtitled The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 2013) looks at three recent French theorists, Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillasoux, arguing that all three ultimately fail to maintain a consistent atheism, regularly relying on various supramaterial elements to hold their systems together. In doing so, the book attempts to clear the ground for a consistently materialist ontology to be pursued in the latter two volumes.

Adrian Johnston is chair and distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of close to a dozen books, including among others Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Northwestern 2005) and Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (Edinburgh 2014). He is also a co-editor of Northwestern University Press’ book series "Diaeresis," of which this trilogy is a contribution.

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David A. Bateman, "Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the US, the UK, and France" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Tue, 05 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

David A. Bateman’s fascinating new book opens with a puzzle. In 19th-century America, why was mass democratization – abolishing property and tax qualifications – accompanied by the mass disenfranchisement of black, male citizens? The book highlights the importance of understanding democratization as both a process of extending political rights and a deliberate effort to change the composition and character of a particular community. Democratization is not simply a neutral set of procedures but a conflict over people-making and Bateman explores the political importance of these narratives with both a deep dive into the American case and two complementary case studies: the United Kingdom and France in the early and late 19th century.

Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the US, the UK, and France (Cambridge University Press, 2020) first explores democratization at the time of the American revolution – finding that democratization was neither connected to disenfranchisement nor focused on race. But, in the early Republic, bi-sectional factions within the Jeffersonian coalition contested black citizenship and the necessity of a white man’s republic. Understanding both the revolutionary and early republican narratives clarifies the mass disenfranchisement of black men in the antebellum period. Chapters on the United Kingdom and France explore the power of political narrative and the construction of “The Other” based on religion, gender, and class. Bateman connects all three cases to contemporary narratives of “real Americans” or “make American great again” arguing that these are new examples of how “the people” can be reconfigured to create hierarchies of worth.

Disenfranchising Democracy won the American Political Science Association’s J. David Greenstone Award for the best book in history and politics. The podcast includes a trenchant analysis of New Jersey as a radical leader in democratization – for free people of color and independent property-owning women.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).

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Laurence Monnais, "The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Mon, 04 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Situated at the crossroads between the history of colonialism, of modern Southeast Asia, and of medical pluralism, this history of medicine and health traces the life of pharmaceuticals in Vietnam under French rule. In The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Laurence Monnais examines the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, looking at both circulation and consumption, considering access to drugs and the existence of multiple therapeutic options in a colonial context. She argues that colonialism was crucial to the worldwide diffusion of modern medicines and speaks to contemporary concerns regarding over-reliance on pharmaceuticals, drug toxicity, self-medication, and the accessibility of effective medicines. Retracing the steps by which pharmaceuticals were produced and distributed, readers meet the many players in the process, from colonial doctors to private pharmacists, from consumers to various drug traders and healers. Yet this is not primarily a history of medicines as objects of colonial science, but rather a history of medicines as tools of social change.

Laurence Monnais is a Professor of History at the University of Montreal.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

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Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.

The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Great Books: Melissa Schwartzberg on Rousseau's "The Social Contract"

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 04:00:00 -0000

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The opening sentence of 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Roussau's The Social Contract poses a central question for all of us. Why do we live under conditions of inequality, violence, dependency and general unhappiness (just look on twitter!) if society is made by us and for us? Why does it seem that modern human beings are not liberated but in fact subjugate themselves voluntarily to a system that robs them off their freedom? Rousseau's thought has informed much of modern political theory and philosophy and inspired people everywhere to think about the balance between individual liberty and collective existence. In order to understand better the lasting influence of Rousseau and his current significance, I spoke with Melissa Schwartzberg, who is Silver Professor of Politics at New York University and a specialist in political theory. Melissa's research is in the historical origins and normative logic of democratic institutions. This means she examines the principles underlying democracies and also the way democratic practices, from constitutions to elections, work out today. Professor Schwartzberg is the author of several books: Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule, and Democracy and Change (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It"

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David Lebovitz, "Drinking French" (Ten Speed Press, 2020)

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Few experiences can top sitting in a Parisian cafe and watching the world go by, a glass of something at your elbow. But if you've ever gone inside the cafe and confronted the battalion of beautiful bottles behind the bar, you may have come to the reluctant conclusion that there is a whole world of French beverages beyond wine that you may never understand.

David Lebovitz to the rescue!

For decades, Lebovitz has guided readers of his many books and engaging website into the world of French cuisine and Parisian life with generosity and eloquence. In his latest book, Drinking French: The Iconic Cocktails, Apéritifs, and Café Traditions of France, with 160 Recipes (Ten Speed Press, 2020), Lebovitz takes us behind the classic zinc bar and explains what goes on there, from early morning coffee to late-night liqueurs. Drinking French unravels the mystery behind the jewel-tones of Pastis, Chartreuse, Vermouth, and Creme de Cassis, the addictive botanical notes of Lillet and Dubonnet, and the emerging craft beer scene in France.

With his signature aimable storytelling, Lebovitz crisscrosses France in search of distillers, infusers, and mixologists and into the annals of France's history to ferret out the fascinating social history of aperitifs and liqueurs. And then there are the recipes: Lebovitz offers his own interpretation of mixed drinks adapted to home preparation, as well as easily-prepared snacks to accompany them. Each of the 160 recipes reminds his loyal readers that Lebovitz’s quest to create something that is more than the sum of its parts serves him—and us -- very well. A thorough read of Drinking French will not only teach you French cafe and bar etiquette, but it will also entice you to dust off your grandmother's cocktail shaker and some of those ancient bottles lurking at the back of your cupboard and mix up a potent concoction to take you from afternoon to evening in one smooth sip. There can surely be no better guide to this brave new beverage world than David Lebovitz.

David Lebovitz is an American chef and writer who lives in Paris. He is the recipient of Saveur's first-ever Blog of the Decade Award in 2019. He is the author of nine books, including My Paris Kitchen, Ready for Dessert, and L'Appart. He writes about food and life on davidlebovitz.com.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History.

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Great Books: Denis Hollier on Lévi-Strauss' "Tristes Tropiques"

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Claude Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques is one of the great books of the 20th century: intellectually bold, morally capacious, and it aims to understand nothing less than the elemental workings of the human mind. Ostensibly a travelogue and ethnographic account of a European's fieldwork among indigenous people in mid-20th century Brazil, it is a work of impassioned curiosity and, even though it's a pessimistic diagnosis of the damage humans (especially Europeans) have inflicted on the planet, it's brimming with hope. The hope to grasp the essence of who we are and we continue to be below the threshold of thinking and above society: call it beauty, call it wisdom, call it human.

Claude Lévi-Strauss invented the field of structural anthropology. In the 1930s he set out to Brazil and studied the indigenous cultures there. Guided by his three deities of Freud, Marx, and geology (all examining the substrata of our existence), he found that human beings make sense of their place in the world - whether they are Parisian living in mid-20th century Europe or indigenous nomadic tribes in the plains and rain forests of South America - through myths that follow certain patterns. What he wrote is a reflection on the devastation Europe wreaked around the world, and whether by studying and thinking with indigenous cultures, we may locate a position from which to think about our own situation in an increasingly overpopulated world.

For Lévi-Strauss myths are not fairytales or children's stories to delight or frighten us. Myths are the deeper patterns by which we make sense of our existence. They are different in all cultures but have underlying shared and universal structures. By recognizing how other cultures make sense of their place in the world, we learn that we, too, rely on similar patterns to make sense of ours. He has startling things to say in this book, for instance that freedom is neither a legal invention nor a philosophical conquest, but deeply linked to the material conditions of a given human's life on earth.

I spoke with Denis Hollier, an expert of French literature, philosophy and culture, about Lévi- Strauss’s radical reinterpretation of what constitutes a culture, about his pessimism, about his relation to academic philosophy, existentialism and deconstruction, and about what we may learn from this giant of a mind who shaped thinkers in all disciplines.

Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It"

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Tom Chaffin, "Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship that Helped Forge Two Nations" (St. Martins, 2019)

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Of the many thousands who participated in the American and French revolutions in the late 18th century, only a handful played roles in both events. Among that select number were Thomas Jefferson and Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, two men who enjoyed a friendship that stretched across five decades.

In Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship that Helped Forge Two Nations (St. Martins, 2019), Tom Chaffin describes the shared views and experiences that bonded them together. As Chaffin describes, the two men first met during the American Revolution after the young Lafayette crossed the Atlantic to participate in the fighting. Though their initial association was brief, the two men grew close during the five years Jefferson served as minister to France in the 1780s, with Jefferson providing the marquis with advice during the early stages of the French Revolution. Though Jefferson and Lafayette were soon parted by the course of events, they would be reunited one final time in 1824 when the marquis visited the former president at Monticello as part of his grand tour of the country.

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Alexander Mikaberidze, "The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Austerlitz, Wagram, Borodino, Trafalgar, Leipzig, Waterloo: these are the battles most closely associated with the Napoleonic Wars. But how did this period of nearly continuous warfare affect the world beyond Europe? The immensity of the fighting waged by France against England, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and the immediate consequences of the tremors that spread from France as a result, overshadow the profound repercussions that the Napoleonic Wars had throughout the world.

In his new book The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (Oxford University Press, 2020), Professor Alexander Mikaberidze of the department of History at Louisiana State University, argues that the Napoleonic Wars can only be fully understood with an international context in mind. France struggled for dominance not only on the plains of Europe but also in the Americas, West and South Africa, Ottoman Empire, Iran, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Taking specific regions in turn, Professor Mikaberidze discusses major political-military events around the world and situates geopolitical decision-making within its long- and short-term contexts. From the British expeditions to Argentina and South Africa to the Franco-Russian maneuvering in the Ottoman Empire, the effects of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars would shape international affairs well into the next century. Skillfully narrated and deeply researched, here at last is the complete global history of the period, one that expands our contemporary view of the Napoleonic Wars and their role in laying the foundations of the modern world.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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Arthur Asseraf, "Electric News in Colonial Algeria" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Arthur Asseraf’s Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the workings of the “news ecosystem” in Algeria from the 1880s to the beginning of the Second World War. The study of a society divided between a dominant (European) settler minority and an Algerian Muslim majority, the book tracks the development and impact of new information technologies—the printing press, telegraph, cinema, radio (and later television)—in Algeria from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Throughout its chapters, readers are reminded to resist Eurocentric and teleological frameworks of “modernization” that do not apply to societies like Algeria’s where such technologies coexisted with other forms of news circulation including manuscripts, song, and rumor/word of mouth.

The book is grounded in an impressive range of sources in multiple languages. It challenges ideas about the relationship between print capitalism and nationalism over the course of this pivotal period in both Algerian and French history. Interrogating the history of colonial hegemony in and through the analysis of how Algerians accessed and interpreted the news in myriad ways often not anticipated by settler and state authorities, the book also has far-reaching implications for how we think about knowledge and power in imperial contexts more broadly. Its pages are rich with exciting and fascinating moments and stories—of surveillance, violence, and injustice, but also of the counterforces of the Algerian subversion of and resistance to colonial oppression.

*Special note in March 2020: I hope you are all keeping safe and healthy and that this conversation with Arthur might be helpful in some small way right now—with work, teaching and/or as a distraction in this period of global pandemic. Thanks so much to Arthur, who was SO much fun to speak with & to all the NBFS listeners out there!

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars(2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction.

The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more.

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Sophie White, "Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2019)

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded.

Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (UNC Press, 2019) draws us into Louisiana’s courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labor, to violence, and, above all, to the intimate romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect. Their words--punctuated by the cadences of Creole and rich with metaphor--produced riveting autobiographical narratives as they veered from the questions posed by interrogators.

Sophie White is Associate Professor of American Studies and Concurrent Associate Professor in the Departments of Africana Studies, History, and Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is an historian of early America with an interdisciplinary focus on cultural encounters between Europeans, Africans and Native Americans, and a commitment to Atlantic and global research perspectives.

This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University.

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The Origins of World War One

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Who or what originated and/or caused the Great War from breaking out in July 1914? Was it Serbia with its expansionist and aggressive designs on Austria-Hungary? Was it Austria-Hungary itself, unnecessarily plunging itself and the rest of Europe in a futile effort to keep together its tottering Monarchy? Was it Tsarist Russia? Attempting to both expand its influence in the Balkans at the expense of both Austria and Germany and at the very same time, seeking to bolster its own tottering monarchy by showing its aggrieved public that Mother Russia was backing the cause of its down-trodden, Slavic brothers. Was it Kaiserreich Germany? Aiming in the famous thesis of 20th-century German historian Fritz Fischer, to launch a Great War to establish itself as the hegemonic power on the European continent? A war which its military leaders stated repeatedly, Germany could only win if war occurred in the next few years. Was it France? Aiming in conjunction with its Russian ally to start a war with the aim of regaining the two lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. Was it Liberal England? Hoping for the final success of the policy of ‘encirclement’ of Germany, commenced by Edward VII?

The origins of the Great War is one of the most fascinating and enthralling subjects in modern History. Which oceans of ink, almost (but not quite) matching the oceans of blood spilled during the war itself, have been devoted to the subject. From the immediate outbreak of the war to the centenary anniversary in 2014, master historians have researched and written on it. Now to bring the topic to the audience of New Books Network, are Jeremy Black, Emeritus Professor of History at Exeter University, without a doubt, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world and Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society. Please listen to this most interesting of podcast.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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John Hardman, "Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen" (Yale UP, 2019)

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new account, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen (Yale University Press, 2019), acclaimed historian of 18th-century French history and the biographer of Louis XVI, John Hardman redresses the balance, corrects and tears away the smears and calumny and sheds fresh light and understanding on Marie-Antoinette’s story.

Hardman shows how Marie-Antoinette played a significant but misunderstood role in the crisis of the last years of the ancien regime. Drawing on new and or rarely used sources, he describes how, from the outset, Marie-Antoinette refused to prioritize the foreign policy of her mother, the Queen-Empress Maria-Theresa, bravely took over the helm from Louis XVI after the collapse of his morale, and, when revolution broke out, listened to the Third Estate and worked closely with repentant radicals to give the constitutional monarchy a fighting chance. For the first time, Hardman demonstrates exactly what influence Marie-Antoinette had and when and how she exerted it. In short Hardman, whose biography is only the second by an academic in the past one-hundred years, provides the reader with a valuable insight into the world and the thought of Marie-Antoinette. Accordingly to historian, Monroe Price, writing in the Literary Review, Hardman has written a "fascinating biography", which is "major contribution to the subject." In short, Hardman's book is one that any serious scholar or student of 18th-century French History cannot go without.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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Jeffrey James Byrne, "Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order" (Oxford UP, 2016)

Wed, 04 Mar 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In his brilliant, category-smashing book, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford University Press, 2016), Jeffrey James Byrne places Algeria at the center of many of the twentieth-century’s international dynamics: decolonization, the Cold War, détente, Third Worldism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and postcolonial state-making. The book is a challenge to the very geography of international history.

Byrne, an associate professor at UBC and one of my MA advisors, packs a lot into this book. Tracing the history of the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962 and the creation of an independent Algerian state in the 1960s and 1970s, Byrne shows how anticolonial revolutionaries and postcolonial statesmen harnessed the interstate system to advance their cause. The book should be read by anyone interested in the Cold War, South-South diplomacy, and how decolonization both remade and strengthened the interstate system.

Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

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Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike.

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Todd Shepard, "Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Departing from the bold and compelling claim that we cannot fully understand the histories of decolonization and the so-called “sexual revolution” apart from one another, Todd Shepard’s Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979 (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is a complex analysis of the lasting impact of the Algerian Revolution through the cultural politics of sex, gender, and power in France. Shepard tracks the figure of the “Arab” man from Algerian independence to the Iranian Revolution. Just as the “Arab” man’s pathologized sexuality played a key role in discussions of French defeat in Algeria as a “failure” of French masculinity on the political “Right,” so too did he become a “heroic” figure for the post-decolonization “Left.” From gay liberation to feminism, debates about sexual norms, prostitution, and rape, the “Arab” man appeared again and again in forms that replayed and riffed off of the sexual orientalism of the colonial period.

Drawing attention to the ways the “erotics of Algerian difference” shaped the terrain of what could and couldn’t be thought in terms of sex post-1962, the book highlights the ideas and work of a number of authors from North Africa and elsewhere, voices that have been written out of histories that understand the sexual revolution as a strictly trans-Atlantic phenomenon. The “vanilla” narratives that have resulted have left out sites such as North Africa, failing to see the role of anti-colonialism in the history of the sexual revolution. At the same time, conventional histories have also regularly refused to deal with sex itself, eliding the significance of discussions of sex acts (like sodomy) as sites of politics and power. As Shepard shows, the Arab man and the legacies of the Algerian Revolution were all over the field of “sex talk” in France through the 1960s and 70s. During this period, then, the war did not vanish from view as other histories have suggested. And the end of this era that was linked to the Iranian Revolution brought a shoring up of Western notions of sexual liberation in response to the oppression and violence (of women and homosexuals in particular) deemed inherent to Arab/Muslim societies. A book that brings together an impressive research corpus with killer historical and political analysis, Sex, France, and Arab Men will captivate readers interested in the (global) history of sex, as well as anyone seeking to better understand the cultural and political landscape of post-decolonization France.

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K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you.

Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that.

Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

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Great Books: Catherine Stimpson on de Beauvior's "The Second Sex"

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

"Woman is not born but made." This is only one of the powerful sentences in Simone de Beauvoir’s magisterial The Second Sex (1949). It means that there’s nothing natural about the fact that 50% of humanity has been oppressed by the other half for millennia. There’s nothing natural about the secondary status of women as either inferior or as helpers, assistants, supporters, care-givers, or objects of reverence, fascination, desire, etc. I spoke with Kate Stimpson, one of the academics who was instrumental in establishing the field of women and gender studies in America. “It’s a total book that calls for total change,” Professor Stimpson explained to me. She talks about the impact of de Beauvoir’s masterful book: what it has done for what is today called gender studies, and what de Beauvoir does for thinking about the whole of the human condition. This is one of my all-time favorite books, and one that everyone should read. It’s also over 800 pages, so this conversation might be a good introduction.

Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It"

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Jessica Lynne Pearson, "The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa" (Harvard UP, 2018)

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

International organizations throw up several obstacles—their immense scale, their dry bureaucratic language—to the historian trying to piece together their past. In her book, The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa (Harvard University Press, 2018), Jessica Lynne Pearson steers clear of these obstacles and tells a captivating and consequential story about the relationship between global governance and empires. And that is no small feat.

The Colonial Politics of Global Health recounts France’s collision with the UN and World Health Organization in the immediate post-World War II years. She shows how French colonial administrators and doctors resisted organizations devoted to “global health,” fearing that they would would ramp up anticolonialism and eventually help detach colonial territories from the metropole. She also shows how that resistance has left legacies that continue to affect Sub-Saharan Africa to this day.

The book should interest historians of empire, health and medicine, and global governance.

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Sarah Wobick-Segev, "Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in 20th-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg" (Stanford UP, 2018)

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In pre-emancipation Europe, most Jews followed Jewish law most of the time, but by the turn of the twentieth century, a new secular Jewish identity had begun to take shape. How did Jews go from lives organized by synagogues, shul, and mikvehs to lives that were conducted in Hillel houses, JCCs, Katz's, and even Chabad? To what extent did their new lives remain explicitly Jewish?

In Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in 20th-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg (Stanford University Press, 2018), Sarah Wobick-Segev tells the story of Ashkenazi Jews as they made their way in European society in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the Jewish communities of Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. At a time of growing political enfranchisement for Jews within European nations, membership in the official Jewish community became increasingly optional, and Jews in turn created spaces and programs to meet new social needs. The contexts of Jewish life expanded beyond the confines of "traditional" Jewish spaces into sites of consumption and leisure, sometimes to the consternation of Jewish authorities. Wobick-Segev argues that the social practices that developed between 1890 and the 1930s―such as celebrating holydays at hotels and restaurants, or sending children to summer camp―fundamentally reshaped Jewish community, redefining and extending the boundaries of where Jewishness happened.

Sarah Wobick-Segev is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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Andrew Israel Ross, "Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris" (Temple UP, 2019)

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

In his provocative new book, Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Temple University Press, 2019), Dr. Andrew Israel Ross maps out the intersection between histories of sexualities and the urban history of Paris in the 1800s. He examines how the regulation of public sex created new ways of understanding the relationship between individuals and the spaces they inhabited. In this interview, he discusses the policing of prostitution through government-sanctioned brothels, efforts to regulate male same-sex sexual activity at the city’s public urinals, Haussmannization and the creation of new sites for public sex, and the emergence of new sexual identities in the Third Republic.

Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris.

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Gillian Glaes, "African Political Activism in Postcolonial France: State Surveillance and Social Welfare" (Routledge, 2018)

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Gillian Glaes’s African Political Activism in Postcolonial France: State Surveillance and Social Welfare (Routledge, 2018) examines the experiences and agency of African immigrants in France from 1960 through the 1970s. Focused on the Africans who migrated to work and live in France during the post-decolonization period, the book tracks continuities with the colonial past while remaining attentive to changes in the French and wider global economies, the politics of the Cold War, and the emergence of new social movements. Sensitive to the challenges faced by individual Africans and their communities in France, including struggles with employment and working conditions, racism, housing, and health, the book highlights the relationship between the state and these immigrants, arguing that immigrants played meaningful roles in shaping public and social welfare policies during this period.

In its six chapters, the book moves from an analysis of the work of the Union générale de Travailleurs sénégalais en France (UGTSF) to rent strikes, protests, and other forms of political activity and community building within the African immigrant population concentrated in Paris and its surrounding banlieues. While the first part of the book is focused on African and their responses to immigrant life, the latter chapters zoom in on issues of state surveillance and policy, including various efforts to police African activisms, bodies, movement, and settlement. While the book will certainly fascinate those interested in issues of immigration and race in postcolonial France, it also holds broader implications for how we think about the history and power of vulnerable populations during this period and in its wake. As the author indicates in the book’s concluding pages, this history can help us to think more carefully and critically about the politics of immigration and refugees within and beyond France in our current moment of crisis including the displacement and precarity of millions of people around the world.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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The Treaty of Versailles One Hundred Years On

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

The Versailles Treaty of 1919, celebrates its one-hundred anniversary this year. And, yet unlike the more recent centenaries, such as that of the outbreak of the Great War or the Russian Revolution, the Versailles Treaty, notwithstanding its importance as perhaps the most important of the twentieth-century, has not seen the same level of interest? Is this relatively indifference due to the fact that it is still regarded by some (in the words of John Maynard Keynes) as a 'Carthaginian Peace', which lead inevitably to the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of the Second World War? To discuss this and other aspects of the Treaty, in the podcast channel, 'Arguing History', are Professor of History at the University of Exeter, Jeremy Black and Dr. Charles Coutinho, of the Royal Historical Society.

Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge, he is the author of well over one-hundred books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement".

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century

European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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Céline Carayon, "Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas" (UNC Press, 2019)

Thu, 12 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Taking a fresh look at the first two centuries of French colonialism in the Americas, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas (University of North Carolina Press and the Omohundro Institute, 2019), answers the long-standing question of how, and how well, Indigenous Americans and the Europeans who arrived on their shores communicated with each other. French explorers and colonists in the sixteenth century noticed that Indigenous peoples from Brazil to Canada used signs to communicate. The French, in response, quickly embraced the nonverbal as a means to overcome cultural and language barriers. Céline Carayon's close examination of their accounts enables her to recover these sophisticated Native practices of embodied expressions.

In a colonial world where communication and trust were essential but complicated by a multitude of languages, intimate and sensory expressions ensured that French colonists and Indigenous peoples understood each other well. Understanding, in turn, bred both genuine personal bonds and violent antagonisms. As Carayon demonstrates, nonverbal communication shaped Indigenous responses and resistance to colonial pressures across the Americas just as it fueled the imperial French imagination. Challenging the notion of colonial America as a site of misunderstandings and insurmountable cultural clashes, Carayon shows that Natives and newcomers used nonverbal means to build relationships before the rise of linguistic fluency--and, crucially, well afterward.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.

However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.

In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world.

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Caroline Weber, “Proust’s Duchess” (Knopf, 2019)

Wed, 27 Nov 2019 05:00:00 -0000

“My greatest adventure was undoubtedly Proust. What is there left to write after that?” This is what Virginia Woolf said, full of admiration -- and envy, too. Delve into Marcel Proust in this conversation with Caroline Weber, author of Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siecle Paris (Knopf, 2019), who has not only read the masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, all 3000 pages and 1.25 million gorgeous, supple and utterly brilliantly composed words (several times), but who has also done the painstaking research to find out who were the real-life people on whom Proust modeled some of the most memorable characters in his sprawling book. The Duchess of Guermantes, a figure of enormous intrigue in the novel, was one of the first manifestations of celebrity culture in the modern age, presaging today's influencers who are known for being known.

Don't read Proust, the wonderfully wise Alain de Botton's counsel notwithstanding, to change your life (be wary of such temptation and be careful what you wish for). For life cannot be changed but must be lived. But read Proust to live your life now deepened by his startling insights into the human condition.

Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It"

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Claire Edington, "Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Both colonies and insane asylums are well known institutions of power. But what of asylums in Europe’s early 20th-century colonial empires? How did they operate? Who was confined in them? Who worked there? What was daily life like in such an institution? How did Western medical experts and the colonized population understand mental illness and its treatment? How did colonial racism impact mental illness? In this episode we chat with Claire Edington, Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, about her new book of Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam (Cornell University Press, 2019).

Beyond the Asylum draws from extensive archival research in Vietnam and France. A gifted writer, Edington is particularly good at presenting the life stories of patients, doctors, and workers drawn into French Indochina’s mental health system. She also looks at the families of patients and the Vietnamese language popular press, as they tried to make sense of troubling issues around mental health, including how the French colonizers understood and treated psychological afflictions. More than a history of the asylum as an institution, Edington uses mental health care facilities as a prism to explore crucial transformations of Vietnamese society in the era of high imperialism. This wide-ranging conversation will be of interest to listeners interested in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, imperialism, French history, and the study and treatment of mental illness. The book is an excellent complement to the increasingly rich historiography of colonial Vietnam.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Annabel L. Kim, "Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions" (Ohio State UP, 2018)

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

In Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions (The Ohio State University Press, 2018), Annabel Kim tangles with the question of difference so central to French feminism, theory, and writing. In a series of literary and historical contextualizations and close readings of authors Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Anne Garréta, Kim tracks the work and thinking of women who wrote against difference across generations, from the 1930s to the present. Along the way, Unbecoming Language is a study of politics and poetics, an interrogation of the impossibility and possibility of subjectivities in language and literature, and a challenge to stereotypical notions of what French feminism and theory might be.

Over the course of its four chapters, the book explores the work of each author while also considering these writers in relationship to one another. Rather than reading literary texts and authors through an external body of French or other “theory,” Unbecoming Language considers the theoretical work that literature does, work we can understand if we read and listen to the writing with sufficient and careful attention. And while these writers resist and shut down certain groundings of being and identity, there is a set of non-identitarian openings created in their work, and in Kim’s own study, openings that bring the corpus together. A different kind of radical politics becomes apparent through unbecoming, a revolutionary hopefulness generated by imaginary worlds without feminine/feminist difference, bodies, subjects, and identities. Unbecoming Lanuguage is a smart and complicated book that will be of interest to readers of each one and all three of these authors, to anyone interested in French literary and feminist history, and to a wider field of those for whom difference remains an open and troubling theoretical and political question.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars(2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing

Sun, 03 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.

How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.

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Julia Nicholls, "Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, 1871-1885" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, 1871-1885 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), is the first comprehensive account of French revolutionary thought in the years between the crushing of France's last nineteenth-century revolution and the re-emergence of socialism as a meaningful electoral force, offering new interpretations of the French revolutionary tradition. Drawing together material from Europe, North America, and the South Pacific, Julia Nicholls, Lecturer in French and European Studies at King’s College, London, pieces together the nature and content of French revolutionary thought in this often overlooked era. She shows that this was an important and creative period, in which activists drew upon fresh ideas they encountered in exile across the world to rebuild a revolutionary movement that was both united and politically viable in the changed circumstances of France's new Third Republic. The relative success of these efforts, moreover, has significant implications for the ways in which we understand the founding years of the Third Republic, the nature of the modern revolutionary tradition, and the origins of European Marxism.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

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Catherine Clark, "Paris and the Cliché of History: The City in Photographs, 1860-1970" (Oxford UP, 2018)

Fri, 18 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

What’s the first image that comes to mind when you hear the words “Paris” and “photography”? Is it a famous photo, perhaps an Atget, Brassai, or Doisneau? In her new book, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City in Photographs, 1860-1970 (Oxford UP, 2018), Catherine Clark explores the history of how and why photographic images have been central to understanding and imagining the city’s present and past, figuring profoundly in the representation and documentation of change over time in the French capital. In this beautifully illustrated and fascinating book, Clark recounts and analyzes the story of the collection, mobilization, and recollection of photographs as historical documents, a visual archive of urban transformation and memory.

From the inauguration of the city’s first photo archives at the Musée Carnavalet, to the illustrated “photohistory” books that used images as documentary evidence, to the photographic museum exhibits, commemoration, and even a citywide contest, in which past and pictures were imbricated, the book looks at how photographs work, and takes seriously their biographies long after moments of capture. Moving beyond the work of key photographers, Clark examines how publishers, historians, public servants, and a range of other actors all participated in making Paris the quintessential capital of photography from the nineteenth century up to the 1970s. The book will be of great interest to anyone interested in the history of the city, of photography, of how the past is conceived and made in a field at once visual, technological, material, and affective.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Michitake Aso, "Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975" (UNC Press, 2018)

Fri, 11 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

How can the history of rubber be used as a way to understand the history of 20th-century Vietnam? In this episode of New Books in History, Michael G. Vann talks about Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), with Michitake Aso, an Associate Professor of history at SUNY Albany. This extremely well-researched study of Vietnamese rubber plantations from the colonial origins to their near destruction during the American war opens new insights into the development of contemporary Vietnam. Dr. Aso explains such things as the difference between environmental and ecological history, how rubber plantations symbolized a type of French colonial modernization, the changing nature of French science, and the role of plantations in the First and Second Indochina Wars.

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Cécile Vidal, "Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society" (UNC Press, 2019)

Tue, 08 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives,Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society (University of North Carolina Press and the Omohundro Institute, 2019), offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cécile Vidal, Professor of History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city’s development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories. Drawing on New Orleans’s rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city’s streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana’s capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America’s most intriguing city.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Kate Kirkpatrick, "Becoming Beauvoir: A Life" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

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Katie Jarvis, "Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Wed, 04 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The king’s guards became increasingly nervous as they watched nearly 7,000 individuals march on Versailles on October 5, 1789. The crowd approaching the king’s chateau was overwhelmingly composed of women who were determined to make their grievances known. Furious at the ever rising price and scarcity of bread, Parisian market women, known as Dames des Halles, joined with other revolutionaries to demand King Louis XVI distribute bread, address the suffering of his subjects, and approve revolutionary reforms. The king ultimately conceded to the market women’s demands. The success of the march symbolized commoners’ new power in politics, including their ability to influence the monarch himself. Although this was certainly watershed moment for the French Revolution, the impact of Dames des Halles went far beyond October 5. As Dr. Katie Jarvis, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, argues in her new book, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (Oxford University Press, 2019) the Dames drew on their patriotic work as activists and their gendered work as republican mothers to compel the French state to provide practical solutions to the many economic, social, and political issues that children, families, and their customers faced in the marketplace daily. The Dames’ notion of citizenship portrayed their useful work, rather than gender, as a cornerstone of civic legitimacy. Although the Revolution has been told as a primarily masculine trajectory of citizenship, Politics in the Marketplace challenges this assumption and reexamines work, gender, and citizenship at the cusp of modern democracy.

Dr. Julia M. Gossard is assistant professor of history and distinguished assistant professor of honor’s education at Utah State University. A historian of 18th-century France, Julia is finishing her manuscript, Coercing Children, that examines children as important actors in social reform, state-building, and imperial projects across the early modern French world. Dr. Gossard is active on Twitter. To learn more about her teaching, research, and experience in digital humanities, visit her website.

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Susan Jaques, "The Caesar of Paris: Napoleon Bonaparte, Rome, and the Artistic Obsession That Shaped An Empire" (Pegasus Books, 2018)

Thu, 22 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In her book, The Caesar of Paris: Napoleon Bonaparte, Rome, and the Artistic Obsession That Shaped An Empire (Pegasus Books, 2018), Susan Jaques offers up a richly detailed and researched account of Napoleon’s fascination with ancient Rome, and how this obsession shaped not only France in the early part of the nineteenth century, but also the city of Paris we know today. In this interview, she traces the cultural history and legacy of the Napoleonic era, discussing topics such as the looting of artworks from conquered states, the creation of the Empire style by architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, the Roman inspirations for the Arc de Triomphe, the Arc du Carrousel, and the Vendôme column, and the politics of art repatriation after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo.

Susan Jaques is a Los Angeles-based author and journalist with a consuming interest in history and art. Her biography, The Empress of Art: Catherine the Great and the Transformation of Russia explores the tsarina’s bold, unprecedented use of art and architecture to legitimize her reign and transform Russia into a European superpower. Her new cultural history, The Caesar of Paris: Napoleon Bonaparte, Rome, and the Artistic Obsession that Shaped an Empire examines Napoleon’s fascination with antiquity and its impact on the urban landscape of Paris (Pegasus Books, April 2016 & December 2018).

Susan’s articles, profiles, and reviews have appeared in such publications as Fine Arts Connoisseur, The Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Toronto Globe and Mail, and NY Review of Books.

Susan holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Stanford University and an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a member of Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture and the Napoleon Historical Society. Susan is a docent at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

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Lisa Greenwald, "Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

May ’68 marked a watershed moment in French society, culture, and political life. The feminist movement was no exception. Women took to the streets and meeting halls around the country, challenging outdated sexual standards, fighting for reproductive freedom, and articulating women’s oppression in radically new ways. In Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Dr. Lisa Greenwald offers a refreshingly new perspective on the history of French feminism, beginning with the liberation of France in 1944--when women were granted the right to vote--to 1981 and the election of a Socialist president who promised to transform women’s status in French society. Greenwald examines the endless challenges of collective organizing, along with the fractious ideological divisions and strategic differences among the various feminist groups that emerged after the events of May. In this interview, she discusses influential figures in the movement such as Gisèle Halimi and Simone Veil and the fight to legalize abortion, Simone de Beauvoir and the influence of The Second Sex on feminists after May ’68, and Antoinette Fouque and the tensions surrounding the Psych-et-Po group. She concludes the interview with an insightful analysis of current debates surrounding the #MeToo movement in France.

Lisa Greenwald, Ph.D. spent almost a decade working in and researching the women’s movement in France, supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship and grants from the French government. She has worked as a consultant and in-house historian for a variety of nonprofits and foundations in France, Chicago, and New York. She teaches history at Stuyvesant High School in New York City.

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Stephen Alan Bourque, "Beyond the Beach: The Allied War Against France" (Naval Institute Press, 2018)

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Did the Allied bombing plan for the liberation of France follow a carefully orchestrated plan, or was it executed on an ad-hoc basis with little concern or regard for collateral damage? How did the bombing of French cities and railheads follow – or disregard – existing air power doctrine, and where did the decision making occur, within the Army Air Forces and Bomber Command, or among the ground unit leaders? What was the cost to human life and material artistic and historic centers, and was it worth it? These are only a few of the questions Stephen Alan Bourque addresses in his well-conceived and well-researched book, Beyond the Beach: The Allied War Against France (Naval Institute Press, 2018). At almost every turn, Stephen challenges the existing triumphalist narratives of the liberation of France to present a heart-wrenching account of disproportionate violence targeting not the German military, but the French people during this stage of the war. A book rife with lessons for our generation, Beyond the Beach is one of the most important texts to appear about the war in France in years.

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Erin-Marie Legacey, "Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780-1830" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Wed, 07 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780-1830 (Cornell University Press, 2019), Dr. Erin-Marie Legacey, Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University, explores the transformation of burial practices in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Public health concerns under the Old Regime prompted reforms in how the French buried their dead, with millions of bones carted away from church graveyards to the deserted mining tunnels underneath the city. After the Revolution, the Catacombs, as well as newly established cemeteries such as Père Lachaise, became more than simply places for the disposal of the deceased. Amidst the turmoil and upheaval wrought by the Revolution, these burial sites became public spaces for Parisians to, as Dr. Legacey writes, “assert and assess their radical break with the past, to reconsider a new set of moeurs in the wake of that break, to reconnect with their fellow Parisians, both alive and dead, and to reimagine their past and its relationship to the present.”

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David Stenner, "Globalizing Morocco: Transnational Activism and the Postcolonial State" (Stanford UP, 2019)

Mon, 29 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The story of Morocco’s independence struggle against France and Spain is a complicated one. Because it occurred around the same time of the long-running war for independence in Algeria, it has received greater scholarly attention. Moreover, Morocco’s continuing alignment with both the United States and France after 1956 has deemphasized Morocco’s importance, compared to more radical anti-colonial states such as Ghana, Guinea, or Tanzania. Lastly, the sultan’s own popularity within his country and the survival of the monarchy today meant that the independence struggle has often been understood through his personality specifically.

David Stenner’s Globalizing Morocco: Transnational Activism and the Postcolonial State (Stanford University Press, 2019) enriches our understanding of Morocco’s nationalist movement. Stenner examines a collection of previously poorly-studied activists whose work began in the international zone in Morocco and then filtered out into the Arab world, France, and to the United States. Stenner shows how this was accomplished, namely via a decentralized system of activists who worked to win over sympathizers and transform them into allies. One consequence of this was that it was highly effective: Morocco became a global issue for a time, even amidst the competing issues of the early Cold War. At the same time, this approach had a number of weaknesses. The fact that it was decentralized and had no hierarchies also made it relatively easy to co-opt, and many important activists found themselves sidelined in the period after independence.

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Stijn Vanheule, Derek Hook and Calum Neill, "Reading Lacan’s Écrits" (Routledge, 2018)

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Lacan published his Écrits in 1966, a compilation of his written work up to that middle period in his teaching. Notoriously difficult to read, the editors of the book we’re discussing today describe the Écrits as “an unwieldy, conglomerate ‘urtext’ … not a book at all … but ‘the waste’ of his teaching: elements he didn’t discuss in public … and sensitive points to which his audience would have reacted with reluctance.” It wasn’t until 2007 that, thanks to work of translator Bruce Fink, the complete edition of the Écrits were finally published in English. Now, Stijn Vanheule, Derek Hook and Calum Neill have brought us the three volume work, Reading Lacan’s Écrits (Routledge, 2018), which features world renowned Lacanian scholars and clinicians explicating in detailed paragraph-by-paragraph commentary each of the essays in the Écrits. Thanks to this publication, coming to grips with the Écrits in all its complexity has suddenly become possible. Lacan’s cryptic pronouncements are miraculously, lucidly reformulated, revealing them in their original and enlightening contributions to the practice and theory of psychoanalysis. What was involved in putting together this monumental and challenging work of exegesis? What does it say about the Lacanian tradition today — in all its differing styles, emphases and factions? Join us in conversation with Derek, Calum and Stijn as we explore this and more.

Jordan Osserman grew up in South Florida and currently calls London home. He received his PhD in gender studies and psychoanalysis from University College London, his MA in psychosocial studies from Birkbeck College, and his BA in womens and gender studies from Dartmouth College. His published work can be found here.

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Donald Reid, "Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968-1981" (Verso Books, 2018)

Thu, 11 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In the summer of 1973, Donald Reid was an undergraduate student who had traveled to France for the first time to work on his Honors thesis in History. It was the “summer of Lip”. Don’s new book, Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968-1981 (Verso Books, 2018) revisits the years leading up to that momentous summer, the drama of events as they unfolded, and their legacies over the years that followed. The result is an in-depth history of the labor activism of workers at the famous Besançon watch factory, workers who took matters into their own hands in various ways over close to a decade. Beginning with the Lip workers’ opposition to attempts to downsize their factory in 1973, the book tracks the vicissitudes of their struggle up to the year the Socialist/Mitterrand government came to power in France.

Throughout the book, Don plays close attention the interplay between the local story of Lip and the broader national and international contexts of the era. Understanding the “Lip Affair” in relationship to the upheavals of 1968 and a range of other forms of political activity and resistance through the 1970s, the book moves between the workers, their supporters, and a wider world of economic, social, cultural, and political change. Along the way, the story highlights the roles of leaders like Charles Piaget, the female workers of Lip who figured centrally in what happened at and beyond the factory gates, and a range of observers who saw in Lip the possibilities of a participatory democratic and anti-authoritarian future. If you already knew something about Lip, you’ll learn so much more from this engaged and carefully researched book. If you’re new to this episode from postwar France, you’ll be grateful to have Opening the Gates as your thorough and fascinating introduction.

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Joan Wallach Scott, "Sex and Secularism" (Princeton UP, 2017)

Tue, 02 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Joan Wallach Scott’s contributions to the history of women and gender, and to feminist theory, will be familiar to listeners across multiple disciplines. Her latest book, Sex and Secularism (Princeton University Press, 2017) is a compelling analysis of the discourse of secularism in the modern democratic (imperial) nation-states of “the West”. A profound challenge to assumptions that secularism has come with the assurance of gender equality, the book moves from the processes of secularization of the nineteenth century, through the era of the Cold War, and on to the notion of a “clash of civilizations” that continues to inform and shape the politics of gender and the gendering of politics in our current moment.

Revisiting decades of scholarship by historians and theorists of gender, religion, the family, and politics, the first three chapters of the book trace persistent and emergent forms of gender inequality that accompanied the insistence on a separation of Church and state in nineteenth-century sites committed to modernity and forms of liberal democracy. Examining the identification of women with religion; the substitution of biological rationales for religious justifications of gendered hierarchies across multiple domains; and the history of women’s suffrage in secular states, this first section of the book synthesizes as it analyzes in order to reveal the ways and reasons secularism did not bring about women’s equality. Subsequent chapters of the book move from the imbrication of gender and secularism during the Cold War to a critique of a “sexual emancipation” that would eventually fixate on Islam as the “enemy” of a secular “West”. Moving from France to other states in Europe, to the United States, and back again, Sex and Secularism will change the way readers (and listeners!) think about the politically powerful and gendered keywords of the book’s title.

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Stacy Fahrenthold, "Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Wed, 19 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In her debut book, Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2019), Stacy Fahrenthold sheds a timely light on Syrian and Lebanese immigrants who established vibrant diaspora communities in the Americas during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing on an impressive array of innovative and transnational sources, including a burgeoning migrant press, police records, passports, forged travel documents, memoirs, and diplomatic cables, Fahrenthold uncovers ethnic associations and transnational networks of migrants who sought to contribute to the betterment of their homeland. Between the Ottomans and the Entente shows how mahjar (diaspora) communities grappled with a series of enormous changes to their homeland from the Young Turk Revolution (1908), to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and the imposition of the French Mandate in 1920. The book vividly illustrates the precarious position Syrians and Lebanese found themselves in as they occupied a fraught liminal space in Ottoman, French, and American law. Even so, Fahrenthold stresses the agency of the Syrian and Lebanese diaspora, which organized, petitioned, recruited soldiers for the Entente, and engaged in contentious debates over what a post-Ottoman Middle East should look like. Written in the midst of the horrific Syrian refugee crisis, as well as a rising tide of xenophobia and trenchant nationalism around the globe, Fahrenthold's exploration of migration, citizenship, repatriation, and an early American "Muslim ban" invite the reader to reflect on both past and present.

Stacy Fahrenthold is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California-Davis, where she teaches courses on global migration and modern Middle East history. She earned her PhD in History from Northeastern University and previously taught at the University of California-Stanislaus.

Joshua Donovan is a PhD candidate at Columbia University's Department of History. His dissertation examines national and sectarian identity formation within the Greek Orthodox Christian community in Syria, Lebanon, and the diaspora.

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David Green, "The Hundred Years War: A People’s History" (Yale UP, 2014)

Wed, 19 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The year 1453 marked the end of an intermittent yet seemingly endless series of wars between the Kingdom of France and the Kingdom of England that, some four hundred years later, was dubbed the Hundred Years War. Depending on how you count even the most conservative estimate of its beginnings would make it longer than that. This conflict led to numerous changes in the life of not only Kings, but in those of men and women; of warriors, priests and peasants; landowners, great and small; ladies, nuns, and housewives; and prisoners of war, and the poor in their infinite variety.

Writing in the midst of this turmoil, after the defeat and capture of the King Jean II of France at the Battle of Poitier, a chronicler wrote: "From that time on all went wrong with the Kingdom and the state was undone. Thieves and robbers rose up everywhere in the land. The nobles despised and hated all others and took no thought for the mutual usefulness and profit of lord and men. They subjected and despoiled the peasants and the men of the villages. In no wise did they defend their country from enemies. Rather did they trample it underfoot, robbing and pillaging the peasants’ goods…"

With me to explain this dreadful period, and its many consequences is David Green, author of The Hundred Years War: A People’s History, published by Yale University Press (2014). A Senior Lecturer in British Studies and History at Harlaxton College, he has published several earlier studies on other aspects of the Hundred Years War.

Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts.

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Francesca Trivellato, "The Promise and Peril of Credit" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

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Cathal J. Nolan, "The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Thu, 06 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, Tours, Agincourt, Austerlitz, Sedan, Stalingrad--all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But were they? As Cathal J. Nolan demonstrates in The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2019), victory in major wars usually has been determined in other ways. Even the most legendarily lopsided of battles did not necessarily decide their outcomes. Nolan also challenges the hoary concept of the military "genius," even of the Great Captains--from Alexander to Frederick and Napoleon--mapping instead the decent into total war.

The Allure of Battle systematically recreates and analyzes the major campaigns among the Great Powers, from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, from the fall of Byzantium to the defeat of the Axis powers, tracing the illusion of "short-war thinking," the hope that victory might be swift and conflict brief. Such as almost never been the case. Even one-sided battles have mainly contributed to victory or defeat by accelerating erosion of the other side's defenses, resources, and will.

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Jeremy Black, "The World at War, 1914-1945" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019)

Wed, 22 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian in the Anglo-phone world, if not indeed on the entire planet, explores the forty-one years from the beginning of the Great War in August 1914 to the surrender of Japan in August 1945. This book provides the reader with an innovative global military history that joins three periods—World War I, the interwar years, and World War II. Professor Black, offers a comprehensive survey of both wars, comparing continuities and differences. He traces the causes of each war and assesses land, sea, and air warfare as separate dimension in each period. A must read for anyone interested in this time period of military and indeed global history.

Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.

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Marixa Lasso, "Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Mon, 20 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Many of our presumptions about the Panama Canal Zone are wrong; it was not carved out of uninhabited jungle, the creation of Lake Gatún did not flood towns and force them to move, people living in the zone prior to the construction of the canal were not out of step with modernity. In her new book Marixa Lasso, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal(Harvard University Press, 2019), argues compellingly that the construction of the Panama Canal prompted the destruction of a bustling network of towns, along with the livelihoods and democratic traditions of their inhabitants.

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Harold J. Cook, "The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Wed, 15 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Harold J. Cook talks about the travels and trials of the young Descartes, a man who spent as much time traveling and fighting as he did studying philosophy. Cook is John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University. He is the author of The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War out this year with University of Chicago Press (2018).

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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René Weis, "The Real Traviata: The Song of Marie Duplessis" (Oxford UP, 2015)

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0000

Though she died in 1847 at a young age, Marie Duplessis inspired one of the greatest operas ever composed. In The Real Traviata: The Song of Marie Duplessis (Oxford University Press, 2015), René Weis recounts the life of the remarkable woman who overcame poverty and abuse to become the toast of Parisian society. Born Alphonsine Plessis, as a young girl she was sexually assaulted by her own father before she escaped to Paris. Initially finding work as a laundress, Duplessis’s beauty soon won her the attention of wealthy admirers, whose interests gave her access to the social elite. As Weis demonstrates, her success as a courtesan was not just because of her physical attractiveness, but also due to her intelligence, her charm, and her generous spirit, all of which won her a range of friends and lovers that included some of the greatest artistic talents of her time. Among them was the younger Alexandre Dumas, whose novel La Dame aux Camélias was based on Duplessis’s life and which, in turn, inspired the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi to write La traviata, an opera which has enchanted and entertained millions ever since its initial performance in 1853.

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Kathleen Keller, "Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa" (U Nebraska Press, 2018)

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0000

Kathleen Keller’s new book, Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) is teeming with mysterious persons, foreigners, misfits, and the surveillance of numerous figures who appeared to threaten the stability of empire. In this detailed and compelling study of what the author has termed the “culture of suspicion” of the years between the world wars, readers are exposed to a range of colonial personalities, practices, and anxieties. Another great title in the University of Nebraska Press’s series, "France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization," the book is a history of intrigue in a distinct region of the French empire that was connected to a more global circulation of bodies and ideas in this period.

Focused on suspects and surveillance in the port city of Dakar in Senegal, the book traces a variety of ways in which colonial authorities sought to suppress forms of political activity including communism, pan-Africanism, anticolonialism, black radicalism, and pan-Islamism. Reading carefully a set of sources generated by imperial administrators fearful of a rising resistance to French rule from different quarters, the book explores the attitudes and representations of authorities while pursuing the life stories and experiences of the suspects themselves. Offering readers a fascinating new account of a pivotal period in the history of French empire, Colonial Suspects makes exciting contributions to the historiographies of French West Africa, the interwar years, the movement of people and politics, as well as the study of imperial authority and the colonial imagination more broadly.

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

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Anne Cheng, "Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface" (Oxford UP, 2017)

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0000

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an inimitable work of critique: Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press, 2017). Moving fluidly and with suspense through Baker’s performances, personal journals, museums, architectural designs, and the lyrics of Cole Porter--to name a few--Cheng draws on the oft-studied but little considered Josephine Baker as a figure of articulation for the nuanced contradictions of primitivism, modernism, and theory. Through Baker, Cheng invites us to reconsider the mutual imbrication of object/subject, surface/depth, and exploitation/fascination. Cheng’s careful eye and beautiful command of texture illustrates that dissolving Baker into pure particularity--into pure surface--is the best way to capture her unique agency.

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Stéphane Henaut and Jeni Mitchell, "A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment" (The New Press, 2018)

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0000

From the cassoulet that won a war to the crêpe that doomed Napoleon, from the rebellions sparked by bread and salt to the new cuisines forged by empire, the history of France is intimately entwined with its gastronomic pursuits. A witty exploration of the facts and legends surrounding some of the most popular French foods and wines by a French cheesemonger and an American academic, A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment(The New Press, 2018) tells the compelling and often surprising story of France from the Roman era to modern times. Traversing the cuisines of France’s most famous cities as well as its underexplored regions, this innovative social history explores the impact of war and imperialism, the age-old tension between tradition and innovation, and the enduring use of food to prop up social and political identities.

The origins of the most legendary French foods and wines—from Roquefort and cognac to croissants and Calvados, from absinthe and oysters to Camembert and champagne—also reveal the social and political trends that propelled France’s rise upon the world stage. They help explain France’s dark history of war and conquest, as well as its most enlightened cultural achievements and the political and scientific innovations that transformed human history. These gastronomic tales will edify even the most seasoned lovers of food, history, and all things French.

Stéphane Henaut grew up in Frankfurt and Nantes, before moving to London and embarking on a wide-ranging career in food, including working in the Harrods fromagerie and cooking for the Lord Mayor of London's banquets. He later returned to Nantes with his family, selling obscure vegetables in a French fruiterie,before joining one of Berlin's finest fromageries.

Jeni Mitchell spent most of her adult life in Washington, DC, working as a researcher and editor in foreign affairs, before moving to London to begin graduate school. She met Stephane on her first day in London; four years later, they married. She has a PhD in war studies from King's College London, where she is a teaching fellow specializing in civil war, insurgency and rebellion.

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Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0000

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.

You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/

Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.

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Andrew Sobanet, "Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality" (Indiana UP, 2018)

Thu, 14 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0000

In his 1924 biography of Mahatma Gandhi, writer Romain Rolland embraced the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence and decried the “dictators of Moscow” and the “idolatrous ideology of the Revolution.” Seven years later, in a startling reversal, Rolland expressed his support for the USSR and confidence in Soviet leaders: “The builders had to dirty their hands; we have no right to act like we are disgusted.” What accounts for this striking about-face? How did Rolland, and other French leftists, come to celebrate and actively promote the authoritarian regime of Joseph Stalin? In Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality, Dr. Andrew Sobanet examines the intellectual trajectories of Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Paul Eluard, and Louis Aragon, and their role in the rise of Stalinism and the cult of Stalin in France from the 1930s through the 1950s. His book also sheds light on contemporary global politics with the recent rehabilitation of Stalin’s image in Russia under Vladimir Putin and the rise of authoritarianism around the world.

Andrew Sobanet, is an Associate Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. His research focuses primarily on the intersection of politics and literature. His research interests include the twentieth-century novel, the contemporary novel, autobiography, non-fiction film, feature film, and twentieth-century history. He is the author of Jail Sentences: Representing Prison in Twentieth-Century French Fiction (U of Nebraska Press, 2008) and Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality (Indiana University Press, 2018). He has also published widely on Vichy France. Since 2011, he has been Associate Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Contemporary French Civilization. He is currently serving as chair of the Department of French and Francophone studies, a position he also held from 2009 to 2015.

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Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 11:00:00 -0000

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race.

Throughout the study, Heng treats race-making as a repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental. Thus constituted, these categories are then used to guide the differential apportioning of power. Scholars working in critical race studies have clearly demonstrated that culture predisposes notions of race. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaffirms that insight by examining the era before the dominance of biological discourses. Race has always been about strategically creating a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. By exploring race in the European middle ages, Heng lays bare the skeleton of racial thinking as a sorting mechanism, a structural relationship for the management of human differences.

In Heng's hands, the tools of critical race studies make it possible to name the systems and atrocities of the Middle Ages for what they were, revealing race-making before the modern vocabulary of race coalesced. Bringing together a group of specialized archives that aren't usually in conversation, Heng in many cases allows the medieval past to powerfully testify to the pre-modern history of race-formation, racial administration, and racist exploitation and oppression.

Beginning with the violent and sweeping anti-Semitism of thirteenth century England, showing the ways that Jews became the template by which other races were measured, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages launches a careful exposure of the way that minority groups were (and are) manipulated to create the sense of a national majority. A short but potent comparison to the English treatment of Irish subjects drives the analysis home.

A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast and as research lead for Unobscured Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him chasing the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States.

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Alexandre Kojève, "Atheism," trans by Jeff Love (Columbia UP, 2018)

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 05:00:00 -0000

Columbia University press has just released a new translation of a work by philosopher Alexandre Kojève, simply titled Atheism, translated by Professor Jeff Love. Considered to be one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and unconventional thinkers, Kojève was a Russian émigré to France whose lectures on Hegel in the 1930s galvanized a generation of French intellectuals. Although Kojève wrote a great deal, he published very little in his lifetime, and so the ongoing rediscovery of his work continues to present new challenges to philosophy and political theory. Written in 1931 but left unfinished, Atheism is an erudite and open-ended exploration of profound questions of estrangement, death, suicide, and the infinite that demonstrates the range and the provocative power of Kojève’s thought.

Ranging across Heidegger, Buddhism, Christianity, German idealism, Russian literature, and mathematics, Kojève advances a novel argument about freedom and authority. He investigates the possibility that there is not any vantage point or source of authority—including philosophy, science, or God—that is outside or beyond politics and the world as we experience it. The question becomes whether atheism—or theism—is even a meaningful position since both affirmation and denial of God’s existence imply a knowledge that seems clearly outside our capacities. Masterfully translated by Jeff Love, this book offers a striking new perspective on Kojève’s work and its implications for theism, atheism, politics, and freedom.

Jeff Love is Research Professor of German and Russian at Clemson University in South Carolina. His publications include books on Tolstoy, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, as well as a translation of Friedrich Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Stefanos Geroulanos, "Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present" (Stanford UP, 2017)

Tue, 12 Feb 2019 11:00:00 -0000

What does it mean to do a “microhistory” of a concept? Stefanos Geroulanos pursues just such a project in the 22 chapters of Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present (Stanford University Press, 2017). A rich and complex history of France in the decades after 1945, the book is as intellectually packed as it is methodologically adventurous. Organized roughly chronologically from the end of the war to the 1980s, the book follows numerous objects, themes, and paths, coming together as a web of thinkers, metaphors, and values that referred and responded to transparency in distinctive ways in the French context. In France as nowhere else, transparency was a particular type of problem, a notion regarded with deep skepticism, suspicion even, for much of the postwar period.

An intellectual history that considers the work of anthropology, political and economic theory, scientific, literary and cinematic texts, Transparency chases the concept well beyond the kinds of philosophical discourses that so often dominate the history of ideas. Divided into five sections, the book begins with the history of the concept of transparency and its uses in the immediate postwar years. It continues with a discussion of state, society, and utopia across a range of sites and figures, from the black market to gangsters, to maladapted adolescents. The third part of the book moves from the 1950s to the early 1960s, exploring norms, structuralism, self and other, face and mask. Part four turns to the question of radicalization and modernity and moves toward May ’68. The final part of the book tracks questions about the agent of history from the late 1960s to the middle of the 1980s. A wild and formidable book that overwhelms in a good way, Transparency is a challenging and impressive project. Speaking with Stef was a pleasure and I hope listeners will enjoy our conversation!

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Sun-Young Park, "Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018)

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 11:00:00 -0000

We know quite a bit about the physical signatures of urban “modernity” foisted upon Paris by Baron Haussmann in the late nineteenth century — the broad boulevards, networked infrastructures, connected apartment houses, and assorted monuments — but little scholarship has seized on its precursors in the half-century prior. In Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Sun-Young Park turns to another modernity, recovering a daunting array of Romantic and especially post-Napoleonic interventions — less spectacular but arguably more complex — on mobile Parisian bodies and the everyday spaces that host them. Park considers military gymnasia, schools, barracks, leisure gardens, and other spaces purpose-built to inculcate vigor in both individuated physical bodies and, their proponents hoped amid specters of national decline, in the French body politic. Each of these spaces, Park shows, a “threshold” between fully private and fully public realms, helped install — albeit imperfectly — its own “ideal” of the sanitized and gendered human subject. Ideals of the Body is a detailed, visually rich, theoretically motivated study in urban and architectural history, one that just might realign how we periodize and make sense of urban modernity writ large.

Peter Ekman is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at psrekman@berkeley.edu.

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Philip Zelikow and Ernest May, "Suez Deconstructed: An Interactive Study in Crisis, War, and Peacemaking" (Brookings Institution, 2018)

Fri, 25 Jan 2019 12:15:00 -0000

Experiencing a major crisis from different viewpoints, step by step: the Suez crisis of 1956— one of the major crises of the 1950s offers a potential master class in statecraft and the politics of strategy. It was an explosive Middle East confrontation capped by a surprise move that reshaped the region for many years to come. It was a diplomatic confrontation between the world’s two major colonial powers (France & Britain) and a major third-world country (Egypt), as well as a conflict between the world’s premier Arab country (Egypt) and Israel. A confrontation that riveted the world’s attention. And it was a short but startling war that ended in unexpected ways for every country involved.

Six countries, including the two superpowers, had major roles, but each saw the situation differently. From one stage to the next, it could be hard to tell which state was really driving the action. As in any good ensemble, all the actors had pivotal parts to play. Among the world-renown figures involved were Sir Anthony Eden, Dwight Eisenhower, David Ben-Gurion, Abdel Nasser and John Foster Dulles.

Like an illustration that uses an exploded view of an object to show how it works, Philip Zelikow and Ernest May's Suez Deconstructed: An Interactive Study in Crisis, War, and Peacemaking (Brookings Institution, 2018) uses an unprecedented design to deconstruct the Suez crisis. The story is broken down into three distinct phases. In each phase, the reader sees the issues as they were perceived by each country involved, taking into account different types of information and diverse characteristics of each leader and that leader’s unique perspectives. Then, after each phase has been laid out, editorial observations invite the reader to consider the interplay.

Using the most updated primary source material and research; developed by an unusual group of veteran policy practitioners and historians working as a team, Suez Deconstructed is not just a fresh and novel way to understand the history of a major world crisis. Whether one’s primary interest is statecraft or history, this study provides a fascinating step-by-step experience, repeatedly shifting from one viewpoint to another. At each stage, readers can gain rare experience in the way these very human leaders sized up their situations, defined and redefined their problems, improvised diplomatic or military solutions, sought ways to influence each other, and tried to change the course of history.

Professor Zelkow has served five Presidents from Reagan through Obama, in various capacities at the State Department, White House, and the Defense Department. He was also the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission. He is currently a professor at the University of Virginia.

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Julian Jackson, "De Gaulle" (Harvard UP, 2018)

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 11:00:00 -0000

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Benoît Majerus, "From the Middle Ages to Today: Experiences and Representations of Madness in Paris" (Parigramme, 2018)

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 11:00:00 -0000

With Paris as the organizing locus of his new book, Du moyen âge à nos jours, expériences et représentations de la folie à Paris [From the Middle Ages to Today, Experiences and Representations of Madness in Paris], Benoît Majerus uses an impressively wide range of visual sources, from religious images and architectural photographs to neuroleptic advertisements and administrative maps. These images are integrated into the text and function not only as illustrations, but also as images with their own story to tell. Majerus’ narrative arc follows the twists and turns of madness in a city long associated with mental pathogens and their cures and reveals how the history of psychiatry can be told differently through the lens of visual culture.

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Denis Provencher, "Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations" (Liverpool UP, 2017)

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 11:00:00 -0000

Sometimes a book can take inspiration from a (not so) simple map. At the end of his previous book, Queer French: Globalization, Language, and Sexual Citizenship (Routledge, 2007), Denis Provencher discusses a map of “gay Paris” drawn by Samir, one of his French interlocutors of North African descent. Samir’s queer urban landscape left out most of the Marais, an area typically considered a center of gay life in the French capital. A follow-up to that 2007 study in some ways, Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations (Liverpool University Press, 2017) is also much more. This new book explores the biographies, experiences, cultural work, and activisms of men of Maghrebi origin, men who were either born in or immigrants to contemporary France. Exploring the workings of culture, religion, community, and kinship, the book engages and intervenes in the fields of queer theory, gender studies, ethnography, linguistics, and cultural studies.

Combining analysis of a variety of cultural texts—including art, literature, photography, film, and performance—with ethnographic data drawn from multiple interviews, QMF interrogates diasporic identity, language, mobility, time, and space. Over the course of the book’s several chapters, Provencher considers the lives and work of the artist and photographer 2Fik; the queer activist, scholar, and imam Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed; the novelist Abdellah Taia; and the filmmaker and screenwriter Mehdi Ben Attia. The final chapter of the book focuses on three anonymous working and middle-class men Provencher interviewed over the course of the project. In addition to highlighting language, temporality, and transfiliation, the book is attentive throughout to the role of technology—its screens and networks—in enabling and shaping different forms of community and (self-)representation. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the book will be of great interest to readers across the fields of LGBTQ, Maghrebi French, and cultural studies.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the culture and politics of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

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Andrew S. Curran, "Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely" (Other Press, 2019)

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 11:00:00 -0000

Denis Diderot has long been regarded as one of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment, thanks to his editorship of the influential multi-volume Encyclopédie. As Andrew S. Curran explains in his biography Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019) however, this was just one product of his wide-ranging literary efforts. The son of a cutler, Diderot underwent training for a life in the church, only to abandon it for an uncertain literary career. Initially finding success as a translator, his early works gained Diderot both acclaim and led to his imprisonment for several months. It was soon after his release that Diderot began work on the Encyclopédie, a years-long project that proved an important vehicle for spreading many of the ideas of the Enlightenment. Curran demonstrates that editing the Encyclopédie served as a way for Diderot to advance his views while avoiding the brunt of the controversy they engendered, with many of his later, often radical works not published until many years after his death in 1784.

Andrew S. Curran (Ph.D., New York University, 1996) is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities and a member of Wesleyan University’s Romance Languages and Literatures department. In addition to Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, his major publications include an edited volume (Faces of Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Thought in Eighteenth-Century Life) and two books: Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, 2001) and, more recently, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2011 / paper 2013). The Anatomy of Blackness recently appeared in French translation (Anatomie de la noirceur) at Classiques Garnier.

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Paola Bertucci, "Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France" (Yale UP, 2018)

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 14:10:00 -0000

Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2018) is an innovative new look at the role of artisans in the French Enlightenment. As savants attempted to appropriate leadership of the mechanical arts while deriding artisans as mere laborers, some of these refashioned themselves as artistes, capable of blending craft knowledge with intellectual esprit. Through the little studied and understood Société des Arts, these advertised their service and utility to the state and French economic and imperia expansion. As they fought for official appointments and academic recognition, they help solidify key the Enlightenment concept of technological progress. Through the eyes and experiences of artistes, the Enlightenment appears much less the product of intellectual breakthroughs, and instead, a reflection of the political economic strategies of artisans as they defined their role within the French empire.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 13:04:00 -0000

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with!

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

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Danna Agmon, "A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India" (Cornell UP, 2017)

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 17:02:50 -0000

People sometimes forget—if they are even aware—that France’s empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a colonial presence in South Asia, a presence that at one time rivaled that of the British. Danna Agmon’s A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India (Cornell University, 2017) zooms in on the 1716 arrest and conviction of a Tamil commercial agent and employee of the French East India Company, a legal case that resonated throughout the empire for decades, even centuries, afterward. The “Nayiniyappa Affair” at the heart of this microhistory is Agmon’s way into a complex web of interests and fractures: the aims and actions of French traders, missionaries, and administrators, as well as the roles and agency of indigenous subjects and intermediaries. Moving from colonial Pondicherry to metropolitan France and back again, A Colonial Affair focuses on a local story and context with much broader implications for how we think about the workings of imperial power, authority, and sovereignty.

In chapters that revisit the narrative of Nayiniyappa’s case from different angles, Agmon treats the affair as a prism illuminating aspects of the history of French colonialism. Examining the scandal from various perspectives, A Colonial Affair considers the myriad ways in which the origins and outcomes of the Nayiniyappa scandal were and might be understood. Throughout the book, Agmon weaves together the richness of the abundant archival material on the affair with careful analysis of the social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics of the case and context, including the meanings and effects of language, religious belief, local and kinship networks. A Colonial Affair will be of wide appeal to readers interested in the histories of France, India, Early modern capitalism, law, and empire in its multiple forms.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the cultural politics of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.

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Shannon Fogg, “Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942-1947” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Thu, 25 Oct 2018 10:00:52 -0000

While the history of the Second World War and Jewish persecution in France has been widely studied, the return of survivors in the aftermath of deportation and genocide has not received sufficient attention. With Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942-1947 (Oxford University Press, 2017), Shannon Fogg, Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Missouri S&T, fills this void. Drawing from government archives, Jewish associational files, as well as victim accounts and testimonies, Fogg pulls the reader into complex and dynamic history of destruction, dispossession and recovery. She reveals the great extent to which French authorities and civilians participated in looting and spoliation. Moreover, Fogg works against the commonly accepted narrative that Jews were passive victims to destruction who silently returned to the remaining tatters of their prewar lives, arguing that survivors were active participants in the restitution process who engaged French and international Jewish organizations to assist with rebuilding. Engaging, skillfully researched, and deftly written, Fogg’s new book will make a valuable addition to both undergraduate syllabi and the bookshelves of seasoned historians of the Second World War and France.

Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Patricia Lorcin and Todd Shepard, “French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories” (U Nebraska Press, 2016)

Wed, 24 Oct 2018 10:00:11 -0000

Following a 2011 meeting of the annual Mediterranean Workshop at the University of Minnesota, Patricia Lorcin (a co-convener) approached Todd Shepard (one of the workshop participants that year) about editing a volume focused on the Mediterranean in the modern period. From the beginning, these two editors of French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) envisioned a collection that would bring together authors whose work pushes against the boundaries of French and European history (from outside of and within these regional fields). Analyzing the history of the Mediterranean as geographic, social, cultural, political, intellectual, and discursive space from the nineteenth century to the era of decolonization, the book offers a critical history of the region understood in its transnational and imperial complexity.

The volume is organized in three parts. Focused on maps and mapping, the first includes essays by Ali Yaycioglu, Ian Coller, Andrew Arsan, and Spencer Segalla. Examining frameworks of migration, the next section features essays by Edhem Eldem, Marc Aymes, Julia Clancy-Smith, and Mary Dewhurst Lewis. In the third part of the collection, authors Sarah Stein, Susan Miller, Ellen Amster, and Emma Kuby interrogate the margins of Mediterranean religious identity, medicine, and the legacies of the Holocaust. Through the analysis of a range of historical actors, events, and the mobilization of different methods and sources, the essays all think carefully through how forms of difference have shaped and divided the region over centuries: nations and borders, language, ethnicity, race, religion, class, and gender. Diverse in their objects of study and approaches, the essays in the volume share a preoccupation with the study of French Mediterraneans plural in their imaginations, populations, and politics throughout the era of modern imperialism.

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Venus Bivar, “Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France” (UNC Press, 2018)

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 10:00:50 -0000

In Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Venus Bivar documents the development of agriculture in post-1944 France. Through the Second World War, France’s agriculture was comparatively backward next to those of its neighbors and geopolitical rivals. The French government undertook a major program of “modernization” to encourage the consolidation of landholdings, increases in the productivity of agricultural labor, and the application of capital-intensive technologies. In this it was successful—at least to the extent that France became one of the world’s leading exporters of agricultural goods. However, as Bivar documents, this transformation was not without considerable resistance: plenty of farmers were unable or unwilling to change, and the transformation of the French countryside generated intense debates about the nature of quality in food and agriculture, and its relationship to the people and land of France.

Venus Bivar is Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, where she pursues research and teaching in three broad fields: European, economic, and environmental history. Her interests include the history of capitalism, agriculture and international trade, and the human history of climate change. Following her book Organic Resistance, she is currently developing two new projects. The first studies the emergence of economic growth as both an economic category of analysis and a political objective, while the second examines the social consequences of port development and urban planning in Marseille.

David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Chapman University, and American Jewish University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British Empire.

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Hervé Guillemain, “Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History” (Alma, 2018)

Tue, 09 Oct 2018 10:00:49 -0000

Schizophrènes au XXe siècle: des effets secondaires de l’histoire [Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History] is a strong argument in support of the history of psychiatry “from below.” Using vast archival resources and ample patient files, Hervé Guillemain demonstrates convincingly how schizophrenia in France was a socially constructed category—one that circumscribed and further stigmatized individuals who were already marginalized and left behind in a changing political, economic, and social landscape. Guillemain follows the surprising twists and turns proffered by his sources, and in so doing, reveals to us an untold and unexpected history of those youth and young adults who tried to take “a leap forward, but failed.” While focusing primarily on France, this book nevertheless surpasses its geographic boundaries and will undoubtedly be engaging for all those interested in the schizophrenia diagnosis.

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Laila Amine, “Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light” (U Wisconsin Press, 2018)

Thu, 27 Sep 2018 10:00:44 -0000

At the heart of Laila Amine’s book is a crucial question: where is Paris? This question may be surprising for anyone who can readily point to the French capital on a map. Geography is, after all stable, is it not? Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) shows that space and place are anything but stable. Amine focuses on the literal margins of Paris, and on the literary and artistic works that are produced in or about those margins. Rather than reproduce the well-worn trope of the banlieue, the outskirts of Paris, as a tragic space whose inhabitants are unable to integrate so-called French values, Amine carefully examines the work of writers and artists who have engaged with the space and have produced pointed critiques of structural inequality and the legacy of colonialism that calls into question traditional French narratives of cultural and religious alterity.

Postcolonial Paris makes the rare and much-needed move of reading across the works of North African and African American writers, artists and filmmakers, thereby expanding traditional scholarly notions of thinkers of African descent in France. From novels to film to graffiti art, Amine writes about spaces that are oft-ignored and that remain productive sites at which to locate Paris and the attendant, highly contested idea of what it means to be French.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements.

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Ludivine Broch, “Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French Railwaymen and the Second World War” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

Thu, 06 Sep 2018 10:00:19 -0000

This spring and summer, the workers of the Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF) staged a series of rolling strikes, slowing and shutting down the country’s major lines of travel and transport. It wasn’t the first time that France’s cheminots (railway workers) have taken a stand, and it certainly won’t be the last. Another major strike is scheduled for early October of this year.

In Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French Railwaymen and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Ludivine Broch examines the history of railway worker resistance and collaboration during the Occupation years. The project departs from a fundamental question about the role the national railways (and their personnel) played in the Holocaust in France. The resulting book is an in-depth labour history that considers class struggle and wartime economic pressures, complicating moral questions about what the cheminots did and didn’t do to enable and/or impede persecutions, deportations, and genocide during the Second World War.

In the chapters of Ordinary Workers, readers will find a rich history of the social and political consciousness of railway workers in France that reaches back to the nineteenth century. Considering Vichy a turning point for cheminot political engagement and activism, the book accords an important place to the question of the resistance of railway workers to the transport of French Jews and other victims during the war. Ordinary Workers also shows that questions of integrity and commitment were paramount for this distinct labour group of thousands of men (and very few women) whose sense of professional identity was intimately tied up with the trains and rail lines they served. Their increased resistance during the Occupation included theft and protest. Sabotage, however, remained an extreme action for these workers who loved their machines and held colleague and passenger safety as high priorities.

Drawing on a range of materials, including company archives, memoirs and postwar testimonies, as well as interviews the author conducted with cheminots throughout France, Ordinary Workers poses serious questions about the beliefs, everyday lives, and actions of a professional group whose experiences, choices, and stories connected French national spaces and politics during a most difficult period of the nation’s history.

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Jonathan Smyth, “Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being: The Search for a Republican Morality” (Manchester UP, 2016)

Wed, 05 Sep 2018 10:00:20 -0000

In his speech delivered to the National Convention on 18 Floréal (May 7, 1794), Maximilien Robespierre shocked his listeners as he attacked the proponents of atheism and dechristianization in the government: “Who nominated you to tell the people that God does not exist anymore? What do you hope to gain by persuading Man…that his soul is nothing but a puff of wind, blown away at the gates of the tomb?” He then proceeded to lay out his vision for a national moral code rooted in a belief in the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. To introduce this civic religion to the people, Robespierre, with the help of Jacques-Louis David, created the Festival of the Supreme Being which would be celebrated across the whole of France. In his book, Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being: The Search for a Republican Morality (Manchester University Press, 2016), Dr. Jonathan Smyth examines Robespierre’s desire to establish a national morality as the foundation for his utopian Republic of Virtue. Drawing from his extensive research in departmental and local archives, Dr. Smyth offers a fascinating look at the festival from the planning stage to its execution in both Paris and the provinces.

Dr. Jonathan Smyth is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. After retirement from his previous profession in 1998, he was awarded a First-Class Honours B.A. in Humanities from the Open University in 2003, and a Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Pamela Pilbeam at Royal Holloway in 2010. He has presented papers on various political, religious, and cultural aspects of the French Revolution, especially revolutionary festivals, at the George Rudé Conference, Society for the Study of French History conferences, various symposia and colloquia in France, and the Society for French Historical Studies Conference in the United States.

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Richard S. Hopkins, “Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris” (LSU Press, 2015)

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 10:00:05 -0000

Beginning in the mid-1800s, Paris experienced an unprecedented growth in the development of parks, squares, and gardens. This greenspace was part of Napoleon III’s plan for a new, modern Paris and a France restored to glory on the international stage. Adolphe Alphand, as director of the newly established park service, brought his own democratic and egalitarian vision to urban planning. In Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris (Louisiana State University Press, 2015), Dr. Richard S. Hopkins examines the urban landscape of Paris from the Second Empire through the Third Republic as an expression of France’s revolutionary past in which disparate groups—from planners, reformers, and engineers to neighborhood residents and park visitors—came together to create, define, and negotiate this new public space.

Richard S. Hopkins is an Assistant Professor of History at Widener University. He teaches courses in European, urban, environmental, and gender history. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of modern France, urban space, and the relationship between the individual and state authority. He is co-editor of the book Practiced Citizenship: Women, Gender, and the State in Modern France, University of Nebraska Press (forthcoming January, 2019).

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The Invisible Committee, “Now” (Semiotext(e), 2017)

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 10:00:11 -0000

What could the communism of the future be? In Now (Semiotext(e), 2017), The Invisible Committee explores our current crisis by thinking through key critical theory questions, along with specific interventions on French and global politics. On this podcast we hear about The Invisible Committee’s history and their work, contextualizing the specific themes covered by Now. Along with theorizing on new forms of political action, Now critiques institutions, offering thoughts on fragmentation and destitution. The book will be essential reading for anyone interested in responding to the current politics.

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Darcie Fontaine, “Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 10:00:35 -0000

What role did Christianity play in Algeria before, during, and after the war of independence? In Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Darcie Fontaine pursues this crucial question while refusing the notion of a homogeneous Christianity at any stage after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Emphasizing the ways religious ideas and practices were subject to change and deep contestation, the book attends to important differences—between Catholics and Protestants; between institutions and individuals; between Christianity as a tool and ideology of the settler state on the one hand, and a site of resistance to its many injustices on the other.

A social history of theology that considers the interaction between religion and politics in Algeria and France, Decolonizing Christianity traces the movement of Christians, their beliefs and activisms, across the Mediterranean in both directions. While the book tracks broad shifts at the levels of the colonial state and Church hierarchies, its chapters stay close to the experiences and impact of Christians “on the ground” in Algeria. The compelling stories of committed individuals and groups of faith figure centrally throughout: the life and work of Léon-Etienne Duval, the Archbishop (and later Cardinal) of Algiers; the 1957 trial of a group of “progressivist” Christians accused of supporting Algerian nationalism; the thousands of Christians who remained in Algeria after the large-scale “exodus” of settlers in 1962. Beyond the French imperial and postcolonial Algerian context, the book “provincializes” the history of Christianity by exploring the broader international meanings and effects of the Algerian case in the era of decolonization. Circumstances and events in Algeria shaped the practices and policies of Catholics and Protestants beyond the new state’s borders as Christians (and their churches) grappled locally and globally with the challenges of responding to (and surviving) the ends of empires.

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Peter Sahlins, “1668: The Year of the Animal in France” (Zone Books, 2017)

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 10:00:09 -0000

Peter Sahlins’s 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (Zone Books, 2017) is a captivating look at the role of animals in court and salon culture in the first decades of Louis XIV’s reign in France. Focusing on the years in and around 1668, Sahlins shows how deeply the king, the court, and the anatomists, artists and writers around it thought with and through animals as Louis XIV redefined royal authority along the lines of absolutism. Through brilliant analyses of the Royal Menagerie and artistic and scientific studies of domestic and exotic fauna, Sahlins demonstrates how absolutism constituted a radical shift in worldview, not only regarding human animals, but the natural world as well.

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Laura Kalba, “Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art” (Penn State UP, 2018)

Thu, 14 Jun 2018 10:00:38 -0000

When you imagine the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, what colors do you see? Whatever comes to mind, Laura Kalba’s, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (Penn State University Press, 2018) will change the way you think about the contents, forms, and significance of the palette of this critical moment in the history of modernity. Examining the impact of emergent color technologies on French visual culture and landscapes, Color in the Age of Impressionism includes, but moves beyond, a discussion of the works and colors of Impressionist artists to consider color theory, dye manufacture, flower cultivation and gardening culture, fireworks, chromolithographic reproduction and collecting, autochromes and neo-Impressionism. Along the way, this is a history of aesthetics, art, fashion, technical innovation, and the modern markets of hue, tone, contrast, harmony, and shade during the “color revolution” of the decades Kalba explores.

Approaching the history of color in the period with the archival passion and conceptual tools of the historian of visual culture, the book pushes past the discussion and prescription of taste to delve deeper into the social, economic, technological, political, and cultural history of color in a France in the throes of the emergence of a consumer and capitalist society divided by class and other differences. A “bottom-up” history of color, Color in the Age of Impressionism takes seriously the question: How did ordinary French men and women understand realism, abstraction, and fantasy during the decades of the emergence of a modernity that included a spectrum of visuality, imagination, and techniques of representation? A winner of The College Art Association’s 2018 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, the study will be of great interest to anyone fascinated by the histories of art, looking, spectacle, culture, and everyday life in France in the decades before and after the fin-de-siècle.

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Bruno Chaouat, “Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism” (Liverpool University Press, 2017)

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 10:00:01 -0000

“Is Theory Good for the Jews?” asks author Bruno Chaouat, professor of French at the University of Minnesota, in Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism (Liverpool University Press, 2017) . The title carries a measure of Chaouat’s characteristically ironic, self-deprecatory, yet polemical tone. So, Chaouat wonders, in both winking reference to the anti-Semitic trope of Jewish tribalism and self-involvement, and at the same time in all sincerity, whether “Theory” – in particular the canon of philosophy, literature, and social thought that grew largely out of Heideggerian roots and which continues to find contemporary purchase – is able to use its own tools to deal with today’s resurgent strains of anti-Semitism.

In this episode, Chaouat discusses several recent events in French letters, including the 2010 publication of writer, diplomat and French Resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel’s manifesto Time for Outrage and novelist Salim Bachi’s literary op-ed, “Moi, Mohammed Merah,” a fictionalized account of the 2012 Toulouse attacks, told from the point of view of the murderer. We also talk about earlier influential figures, such as Georges Bataille and Jean Genet, and discuss how the vocabularies they invented, which they used to retool ideas of evil, transgression, and “our common inhumanity,” come to be recoded in service of a new “moralistic turn.”

Daveeda Goldberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities at York University, in Toronto, Canada.

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Yoav Di-Capua, “No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonization” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 31 May 2018 10:00:15 -0000

Yoav Di-Capua‘s new book, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is narrative intellectual history at its best: a tale of friendship and betrayal, of missed connections and surprising syntheses, of unfinished revolutions, Oedipal revolts, and angst-ridden meditations on the meaning of freedom. Di-Capua’s story begins in May of 1944 with a six-hour dissertation defense heard around the Arab world, in which ‘Abd al-Rahman Badawi demonstrated the compatibility of Heideggerian phenomenology and Sufism. The subsequent chapters of No Exit offer a tour of existentialist hotbeds across the Middle East, ending with a detailed account of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Claude Lanzmann’s visit to the region on the eve of the 1967 war. At each juncture, Di-Capua offers a lucid analysis of how the Arab intelligentsia struggled with a set of intertwined questions about decolonization: What does it take to “secure the physical liberation of the population and define its space?” What should be done to repair the “colonial destruction of the sociocultural fabric?” And “what does it mean to be a person after colonialism?” Our conversation focused primarily on the quest for being, the meaning of intellectual “commitment,” and the role existentialism played in the development of Palestinian political philosophy.

David Gutherz is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His research centers on the history of the human sciences and revolutionary politics, with a special interest in Fascist and Post-Fascist Italy.”

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Catherine Soussloff, “Foucault on Painting” (U Minnesota Press, 2017)

Tue, 22 May 2018 10:00:03 -0000

In Foucault on Painting (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Catherine Soussloff discusses an area of Foucault’s development that has remained largely overlooked: his engagement with painting. Indeed Foucault, we learn, described himself as a painter. Throughout his career, he examined painting and the image as he pursued critical elements of his philosophical ideas. Soussloff examines Foucault’s engagement with periods in European art history that captured his attention in particular: the Baroque, mid-nineteenth century French painting, Surrealism, and figurative painting of the 1960s and 1970s. The book also considers Foucault’s interest in five artists: Velázquez, Manet, Magritte, Rebeyrolle, and Fromanger. Soussloff’s study reveals the importance of art in Foucault’s philosophy, and affirms the relevancy of Foucault in consideration of the role of the image in the twenty first Century

Kirstin L. Ellsworth has a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University (2005) and currently is an Assistant Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hills. Email: kellsworth@csudh.edu.

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Kate Skinner, “The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

Tue, 15 May 2018 10:00:48 -0000

In her book, The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Kate Skinner examines the history behind the failed project that sought the reunification of Togoland. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Germans colonized the small territory of Togo in West Africa. During the first world war, the British and French invaded Togo and split it between them, introducing a new border that was criticized by the African inhabitants. After the second world war, in the era of decolonization, different visions of independence were put forward. One of these was ABLODE – meaning the reunification and joint independence of British and French Togoland. But the Ablode movement was defeated, and instead British Togoland was integrated with the Gold Coast, and became an integral part of an independent Ghana. The Fruits of Freedom tells the story of ABLODE.’

Kate Skinner is a lecturer in the History of Africa and Its Diasporas at the University of Birmingham. Her forthcoming publication is Ablode Safui (the Key to Freedom): Writing the New Nation in a West African Border Town 1958-63 (written with Dr. Wilson Yayoh of the University of Cape Coast, Ghana).

Bekeh Utietiang Ukelina is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY, Cortland. His research examines the ideologies and practices of development in Africa, south of the Sahara. He is the author of The Second Colonial Occupation: Development Planning, Agriculture, and the Legacies of British Rule in Nigeria. For more NBN interviews, follow him on Twitter @bekeh or head to bekeh.com.

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Leah Bassel and Akwugo Emejulu, “Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain” (Policy Press, 2017)

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 10:00:07 -0000

What is the impact of austerity on minority women? How has this impacted on already long standing forms of social inequality across England, France and Scotland? These questions are the subject of Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain (Policy Press, 2017), the new book from Dr. Leah Bassel, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Leicester, and Professor Akwugo Emejulu, a professor of sociology at the University of Warwick. The book foregrounds the narratives and understandings of minority women activists with regard to the current political moment. It challenges contemporary social policy analysis by using an intersectional approach to the impact of both state and third sector actions, as well as the political mobilizations associated with resistance. Drawing on a wealth of interview fieldwork, detailed policy analysis, and a deep but accessible theoretical framework, the book offers an important intervention on the failures of both right and left wing politics in response to the ongoing marginalization and poverty experienced by women of color. The book is an essential and important read for social policy, sociology, and politics scholars, as well as for anyone who seeks to understand the reality of the racialized and patriarchal contemporary state.

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Katelyn Knox, “Race on Display in Twentieth- and Twenty First-Century France” (Liverpool UP, 2016)

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 10:00:24 -0000

Katelyn Knox’s book, Race on Display in Twentieth- and Twenty First–Century France (Liverpool University Press, 2016) examines francophone literature, art, dance, music, and fashion, considering how race and national identity intersect in postcolonial France. Emphasizing a widespread “institutionalized spectacularism” in France that exceeds the display of racialized bodies in more explicit, state-produced and orchestrated spectacle, Knox’s analysis emphasizes a more pervasive gaze permeating contemporary French culture. Moving from a discussion of the Colonial Exposition of 1931 to the analysis of more contemporary cultural forms, the book is a study of race that looks at a range of sources and varieties of performance.

Thinking carefully through the persistent French engagement with and mobilization of ideas about race, Knox’s chapters explore official historical discourse, rhetoric and new media, cultural marketplaces, and the field of French and Francophone studies itself. The analysis throughout includes drawing attention to and interrogating a French universalist insistence on a “colorblind” society that has made looking for and looking at race a complicated challenge. Part history, part literary and cultural analysis, the book asks serious questions about the reproduction of racist gazes that can accompany even the most well-intentioned discussions of exclusion in France. It also considers whiteness as a constellation of nationalist ideals and assumptions that must be interrogated if the divisions and discriminations of contemporary France are to be understood and addressed.

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Kimberly A. Francis, “Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon” (Oxford UP, 2015)

Wed, 11 Apr 2018 10:00:58 -0000

Pedagogue, composer, and conductor Nadia Boulanger was a central figure in Igor Stravinsky’s life during the middle part of his career, providing him with support, advice, and a discerning analytical and editorial voice when he was writing some of his most important compositions including the Symphony of Psalms and Persephone. Dr. Kimberly A. Francis has recently published two books related to the complicated and tangled relationship between these two people. The first, released in 2015 by Oxford University Press, is Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon. Just last month, Boydell and Brewer published Francis’s edition of their letters in Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys: A Selected Correspondence. In other hands, Teaching Stravinsky might have been a simple joint biography, but Francis grounds her work within a theoretical framework that promotes a new approach to musicology and other fields. Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on cultural production, Francis reminds us that as long as musicologists insist on centering their scholarship on the lone composer/genius, someone who is almost always a man, we will miss how creative works are really a result of the complex interplay of networks of influence, and collaborators who participated in individual composers’ lives and music. She positions Boulanger as a participant in the cultural field of musical modernism, who used her position to influence Stravinsky’s compositions while also promoting and shaping his reputation as the premiere neo-classicist composer. At the center of Teaching Stravinsky is the long correspondence between Stravinsky, members of his family, and Boulanger which spans over forty years. In Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinkys, Francis edits and provides the English translation of most of the letters exchanged by the two friends providing readers not only the source material for her own work, but also an important resource for anyone interested in twentieth-century music. Both books have extensive companion websites. Perhaps most exciting in the Teaching Stravinsky website are the reproductions of pages from Stravinksy’s scores containing Boulanger’s comments with Francis’s explanations. The companion site for Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys holds all the letters in their original French.

Kimberly A. Francis is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Guelph in Canada. Her work centers on twentieth and twenty-first century music and feminist musicology. She has published articles in many journals including The Musical Quarterly, Women and Music, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. Her work has been recognized many times with awards such as a Glen Haydon Award for her dissertation from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010, and the American Musicological Society’s Paul A. Pisk Prize and Teaching Fund Award. She was an International Fellow with the American Association of University Women. Her research has been supported by multiple grants including a General Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (20112013). She also serves as Editor-in Chief for the University of Guelph’s award-winning journal, Critical Voices: The University of Guelph Book Review Project.

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Sandra Ott, “Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the West Pyrenees, 1940-1948” (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 10:00:33 -0000

In her new book, Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the West Pyrenees, 1940-1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Sandra Ott, Associate Professor of Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno examines German occupation of the Pyrenees. Particularly, Dr. Ott examines cases of collaboration and later justice and demonstrates how collaboration was often motivated out of base desires. She tells the story of this unique region through nine case studies of collaboration with a diverse group of characters bringing to life this fascinating history.

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Mehammed Mack, “Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture” (Fordham UP, 2017)

Thu, 29 Mar 2018 10:00:26 -0000

In the recent past, anti-Muslim hate crimes and rhetoric have surged across America and Europe. Much of this public discourse revolves around questions of assimilation and where Muslim positions on sexuality and gender fit into national unity. In Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture (Fordham University Press, 2017), Mehammed Amadeus Mack, Assistant Professor of French Studies at Smith College, explores the politicization of Muslim minority sexuality in France in various cultural domains. Whether in literature, journalistic media, or activist endeavors the general portrayal of Muslims in these contexts is structured around unmodern attitudes towards sexuality. It is assumed that African and Arab minorities in France are regressive, patriarchal, and intolerant of homosexuality. Through his study of a number of cultural arenas of representation Mack demonstrates that sexual identities are often unclear, hidden, or in flux. In our conversation we discussed sexuality and French identity, aspects of non-gendered virility, homosexual clandestinity and the possibility of queer identities, girl gangs, psychoanalysis and Islam, the literary trope of the Arab Boy, cinematic representations of ethnic sexualities, the management and surveillance of sexuality, the role of pornography in the sexualization of Muslims, gay-interest publications, the continued sexual demonization of Muslims in the current social climate in France and Europe, and the literary production of Eurabia.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

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Fareen Parvez, “Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India (Oxford UP, 2017)

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 10:00:32 -0000

Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India (Oxford University Press, 2017) by Fareen Parvez is a rich ethnographic analysis of Islamic Revival movements in France (Lyon) and India (Hyderabad). In her study, Parvez maps the complex ways in which Muslims, especially women, engage in religious and political activism in secular states where they are minorities. Her study challenges many notions of secularity and political Islam, particularly as it intersects with complex class identities (i.e., those who are marginalized socio-economically) both in India and France. Moving through everyday spaces, such as schools (Islamic and secular), conferences, mosques, and cafes, Parvez’s study attunes us to the intricate realities of women’s political and religious activism. This study is of great importance to scholars invested in minority and Muslim politics in India and France, as well those working on secularism, Muslim women, and political Islam, while Parvez’s ethnographic methodologies and reflections would be of great value for those working in anthropology.

M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Ithaca College. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloomsbury Press, 201800) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2018). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at mxavier@ithaca.edu.

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Eric T. Jennings, “Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus from the French Caribbean” (Harvard UP, 2018)

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 10:00:14 -0000

In Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean (Harvard University Press, 2018), Eric T. Jennings reveals the fascinating history of the Martinique Corridor, a pathway travelled by thousands of political refugees who fled mainland France in the early years of the Second World War. Jennings deftly describes the array of obstacles faced by individuals seeking escape to Martinique, from difficulty dealing with French bureaucracy, to the perils of traveling by sea in wartime, to hostile reception by locals and officials after disembarking at shores of the French colony. Unable to reach their intended destinations in North, Central, and South America, many of refugees found themselves trapped on the island. According to Jennings, this led to numerous accidental and fruitful encounters between the motley crew of refugees (which included numerous renowned artists and intellectuals) and prominent local thinkers. Their unlikely interactions fostered new waves of thinking about racism and colonialism.

Eric T. Jennings is a professor of history at the University of Toronto, where he is affiliated with Victoria College. He is the author of numerous publications including Vichy in the Tropics(Stanford University Press, 2004), Curing the Colonizers: Hydroptherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (Duke University Press, 2006), and Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011).

Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Robert Darnton, “A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2018)

Thu, 15 Mar 2018 10:10:04 -0000

Five decades ago, a young scholar named Robert Darnton followed up on a footnote that took him to the archives of the “Typographical Society of Neuchatel”(S.T.N.) in Switzerland, not far from the French border. Many years, and thousands of documents later, Professor Robert Darnton has published a new book, A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018). Apart from illuminating the everyday life of the trade that enabled and shaped French reading practices, the book is a methodological feat that mines an impressive array of sources to access the financial, legal, political, and cultural history of book distribution before the French Revolution.

Following the trail of Jean-Francois Favager, a sales rep of the S.T.N. who toured France in 1778, Darnton’s thirteen chapters trace his journey from Neuchatel, across the border into France, down the southeast to Lyon and Marseille, west towards Bordeaux, then north before crossing back to Besancon and home (with many stops in between). As the book pursues Favager’s story, the reader learns about the challenges of travel by horse in this period, including border-crossings, the network of roads that connected French towns and cities in the eighteenth century, and the many obstacles that arose along the way. A history of the movement of foreign books into a French market, A Literary Tour de France also explores the histories of smuggling, piracy, contract and business law and values. Focused on the world of books in the French provinces, rather than Paris, this study offers today’s reader insight into the demands and supplies of their eighteenth-century counterparts and the range of booksellers who sold their wares. The result is a rich and textured account of how and what many French people were able to read in the decades before the upheaval of 1789.

I encourage all of you to visit the books companion website, including a treasure of primary sources that will enhance and extend the reading of A Literary Tour de France.

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Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva, “Mother of the Church” (Northern Illinois UP, 2016)

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 10:00:54 -0000

In Mother of the Church: Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva explores an influential figure in the history of Russian Catholicism. A Russian noblewoman and Catholic convert living in Paris in the early to mid-nineteenth century, Svechina (1782-1857) was the hostess of an illustrious and distinctively religious salon frequented both by the French and by her fellow Russian expatriates. First a salonniere in St. Petersburg, Svechina relocated to Paris after the rise of anti-Catholic and anti-French sentiment in Russia following the French Revolution. Svechina played a pivotal role in Liberal Catholic movement, acting as a mentor, spiritual counselor, and intimate friend to some of its leading figures, her influence extending into the world of political ideas beyond the salon. In this interview, Tatyana Bakhmetyeva discusses the intellectual and spiritual formation and influence of Sophia Svechina in the context of the religious, political, and intellectual development of Russia and France during her lifetime.

Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Associate Academic Director for the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 2006. Her research interests center on religion, gender, and national identity in Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and Belorussia. Her publications include”Russian Catholicism and the Collapse of the Ideals of the Enlightenment” (2006) and “Russian Catholicism in the First Quarter of 19th Century: A New Look” (2005).

Diana Dukhanova is Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University.

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David Narrett, “Adventurism and Empire” (UNC Press, 2015)

Fri, 23 Feb 2018 11:00:58 -0000

In his new book, Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762-1803 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), David Narrett explores the international political and diplomatic competition for control of the Old Southwest. His book begins with the conclusion of the French and Indian War and follows the story until the Louisiana Purchase secured the area for the United States. It superbly illustrates the weak control exerted by Britain, France, and Spain over the Louisiana-Florida borderlands during the last half of the eighteenth century. It also highlights the fragile ties between Anglo-Americans in the region and the newly independent United States. In doing so, Narrett introduces a rogues’ gallery of schemers and adventurers who operated below the radar, ready to do whatever it took to further their private ends. He also ably covers the diplomatic machinations of imperial and American officials as they tried to make good their claims to lands between the southern Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River.

George Milne, the host of this podcast is an associate professor of history at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He specializes in Native American, Colonial, and Atlantic World history. His book Natchez Country, Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2015. You can contact him at milne@oakland.edu and follow him on Facebook at George.E.Milne.

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Jean Beaman, “Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France” (U California Press, 2017)

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 11:00:06 -0000

What does it mean to be a citizen? Every country has its own legal codes that confer a set of rights on official members. But full citizenship is often more than what the law says. A better question is: what does it mean to be an accepted member of one’s society? According to France’s Republicanism, national and civic terms determine identity, and basic citizenship, “being French,” trumps all other group affiliations. Race, ethnicity—those common and powerful sources of identity and symbols of belonging—simply do not exist within this model. Not so for everyone in France, according to sociologist Jean Beaman in her new book Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017). In this work, Beaman focuses on a group of people in France who have ostensibly “made it”—children of maghrebin immigrants who have obtained university (and sometimes post-graduate) degrees, work professional jobs, and entered the middle class—and who mostly embrace French culture and the country’s sense of Republicanism, but who are not accepted as French by their country. They feel French, but are not regarded as French. Driven by the question of “what does it mean to be a minority in a society that does not recognize minorities?” Beaman lets her participants’ lives and experiences shine, and her analyses reveal the unfortunate conditions and realities of their everyday existence as “citizen outsiders”: both an ordinary member of their society, and a total foreigner at the same time.

Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.

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Robert Foxcurran, “Songs Upon the Rivers” (Baraka Books, 2016)

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 05:00:29 -0000

The story of the American West as it is often told typically involves Spanish, British, and American Empires struggling with Indigenous people for control of the vast territory lands and riches from the Mississippi to the Pacific. After the seventeenth century, French colonists and French-speaking Metis are often relegated to the role of bit players in this tale. Songs Upon the Rivers: The Buried History of the French-Speaking Canadiens and Metis From the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Across to the Pacific (Baraka Books, 2016) reemphasizes the importance of the French imperial legacy and Metis influence in the Great Lakes region, on the northern plains, and in the far Pacific West. In doing so, this book challenges American and Canadian narratives about the west which too often tend toward racial and national binaries. By telling the stories of people who lived across ethnic and national boundaries, Robert Foxcurran, Michel Bouchard, and Sebastien Mallett show how historians can use the complications of the past to explode notions of perceived difference in the present day, and in doing so reveal important stories about the Trans-Mississippi West which have been buried for far too long.

Robert Foxcurran is an independent scholar and former historian for the Boeing Corporation, he can be reached at robert.r.foxcurran@gmail.com; Michel Bouchard is a Professor of anthropology at the University of Northern British Columbia; Sebastien Malette is an Assistant Professor in the Law and Legal Studies Department at Carleton University.

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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Marlene Daut, “Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism” (Palgrave, 2017)

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 11:00:33 -0000

In Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave, 2017), Marlene Daut helps to resurrect the life and writings of one of Haiti’s most influential thinkers. Baron de Vastey is perhaps best known as Henri Christophe’s secretary in the years after Haitian independence. Within that position, Vastey wrote extensively on the new Haitian state, the indescribable horrors of slavery and colonization, and the fallacy of racial prejudice. As Daut explains, Vastey was at the vanguard of black intellectual expression in the Americas, particularly in his deconstruction of colonial oppression. Her book helps to situate Vastey within the complex historical and literary world of post-independence Haiti, and offers a fresh take on the intellectual contributions of the Caribbean’s first black state.

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Claire Eldridge, “From Empire to Exile” (Manchester UP, 2016)

Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:57:38 -0000

The French-Algerian War that erupted in 1954 ended with the emergence of an independent Algeria in 1962, but it was not until decades later that a broader French public turned its attention with vigor to the violence and pain of that conflict. Indeed, the French state only officially recognized the war as a war in 1999. Claire Eldridge‘s From Empire to Exile: History and Memory Within the Pied-noir and Harki Communities, 1962-2012 (Manchester University Press, 2016) interrogates the war’s legacies by focusing on the French settlers and the native military and civilian auxiliaries who fled Algeria in the thousands as French colonialism there came to an end. Examining pied-noir and harki grassroots collective mobilization and memory activism in France after 1962, From Exile to Empire shows that, while the war may have been repressed and silenced in a variety of ways in French society, the conflict was far from “forgotten” for these communities.

Addressing material concerns including housing, poverty, and forms of indemnity, and attempting to preserve their cultures and histories, community associations forged new identities in France while advocating for the recognition of their suffering and their positive contributions to the nation and its (former) empire. Divided into two parts, the book covers the memory work of these communities from 1962 to 1991, and then from the early 1990s up to the 50th anniversary of the end of the conflict in 2012. Drawing on a wide range of pied-noir and harki sources, From Empire to Exile has much to offer those interested in the history of the war and its aftermaths. It will also make fascinating reading for anyone concerned with popular and community memory in the wake of traumatic and violent pasts more generally.

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

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Jason Herbeck, “Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean” (Liverpool UP, 2017)

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 13:54:02 -0000

What do gingerbread houses in Haiti teach us about the construction of identity in the French Caribbean? How do hurricanes and earthquakes reveal the connections between the tangible built environment and intangible notions of identity? Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean (Liverpool University Press, 2017) examines these questions in a rich body of works from Haiti, Guadeloupe and Martinique. The book proposes two key concepts to aid in our understanding of Caribbean writers’ construction of identity in their literary works. The term “architexture” asks readers to be attentive to the building blocks of the text and the inner workings of literary works that reflect on themselves and reach out beyond their own pages to be in conversation with other writers, other texts, other stories. Authenticity underscores the ever-present specter of the colonial past and the possibilities for drawing on multiple influences (or in Herbeck’s terminology, using multiple building materials) to construct a unique and original Caribbean identity. Drawing on a range of writers including Maryse Conde, Daniel Maximin and Yanick Lahens, this book steps back from a narrow view of the finished edifice and takes in the scaffolding and mortar that holds these narratives together.

Jason Herbeck is Professor of French at Boise State University. His research focuses primarily on evolving narrative forms in twentieth and twenty-first-century French and French-Caribbean literatures, and how these forms relate to expressions and constructions of identity. In addition to many articles and book chapters devoted to the literatures and histories of Haiti, Martinique and Guadeloupe, he has also published widely on Albert Camus and is, since 2009, President of the North American Section of the Societe des Etudes Camusiennes.

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Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, “Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France” (Liverpool UP, 2016)

Thu, 18 Jan 2018 11:00:21 -0000

Connections between France and North Africa have long been shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and economics. This intercultural relationship has also been mediated through the arts. In Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France (Liverpool University Press, 2016), Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, Assistant Professor of French at the University of Rhode Island, examines one population who has often been left out of these cultural formations. Kemp focuses on the representation of first-generation Maghrebi women in France in documentaries, short films, feature films, and telefilms. Her analysis revolves around filmic textual analysis and the production, audience reception, and distribution of these art forms in contemporary French society. Kemp is attuned to filmic genre conventions, narrative structures, and formal techniques that media producers and artists use to both appeal to large mainstream audiences while challenging dominant stereotypes about Muslims. In our conversation we discussed views of North Africans in French society, means for recovering voice in film, the role of religion in French cinema, the mediation of subjects in documentary films, the role of objects in voicing difference, expressing agency of women protagonists, the goals of dialogue and voiceover versus body language or non-verbal communication, and film’s ability to challenge dominant stereotypes in France.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

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Wolfgang Seibel, “Persecution and Rescue: The Politics of the Final Solution in France, 1940-1944” (U Michigan Press, 2017)

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 11:00:49 -0000

In his recent book, Persecution and Rescue: The Politics of the Final Solution in France, 1940-1944 (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Wolfgang Seibel explores the factors that shaped the Holocaust in wartime France. Eschewing the recent emphasis on ideology, Seibel offers a more administrative-science-based analysis, arguing that the fate of the Jews both their persecution and rescue was the result of different agencies pursuing competing aims within the French Power-Sharing Administration. Whether it was the Vichy regimes efforts to preserve autonomy from German interference, or the SS’s attempts assert its dominance over the Wehrmacht, what happened to the Jews in France, Seibel argues, was influenced by these turf-wars and the necessary trade-offs they engendered, whatever the ideological beliefs of the actors involved.

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Sarah Fishman, “From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Fri, 29 Dec 2017 15:35:19 -0000

In her latest book, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France (Oxford University Press, 2017), Sarah Fishman offers reader a social history of French families in the years that followed the Second World War. Fishman is focused here on illuminating the daily and practical lives of the men, women, and children who worked and often struggled to transition from wartime to peacetime. After 1945, French families had to negotiate a variety of changes that shaped, and were shaped by, shifting ideas and attitudes about gender roles and relations, love, sexuality, marriage, and parenting. To access the lives of French working and lower-middle class families, Fishman draws on a wide range of sources, including previously neglected popular press publications that reflected the politics and experiences of working people. She also uses juvenile court records from the period that detail family lives and dynamics, as well as state and societal norms and expectations.

Tracing the contours of a broad transformation from a vision of family centered on (paternal) authority to an emphasis on relationships, including fatherhood, the book also considers the impact of the ideas of figures like Freud, Beauvoir, and Kinsey on the everyday beliefs and behaviors of ordinary people. Attentive to the continuities and changes that ran throughout the period from 1940 to the late 1960s, the book places the postwar in a context that remembers the war while also setting the stage for the eruption of French political, social, and cultural life in 1968.

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David Hopkin, “Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France” (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Mon, 25 Dec 2017 17:40:25 -0000

The author of this book, David Hopkin, is Professor of European Social History at Hertford College, Oxford. He is also my brother. However, I’m not featuring him on New Books in Folklore because of some misguided sense of nepotism, but rather because although he is historian by training, he is a folklorist by vocation. This duality is amply evident in his book Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2017) in which he explicitly states that he is proselytizing for a folkloric turn within the discipline of history. As he explains in his introduction, this turn essentially makes two demands of historians. Firstly, I want them to consider oral literature such as tales and songs as appropriate sources for historical analysis; secondly I want to acquaint them with those aspects of post-war folklore scholarship that provide powerful methodologies for understanding popular culture.

The bulk of the book is then given over to a series of case studies in which Hopkin practices what he preaches as he mines folklore collections for material which he then examines and interprets in order to shed light on the lives of ordinary people. The chapter titles indicate his chosen subjects: “Storytelling in a Maritime Community: Saint-Cast, 1879-1882,” “The Sailors Tale: Storytelling on Board the North Atlantic Fishing Fleet,” “Love Riddles and Family Strategies in the Dyemans of Lorraine,” “Storytelling and Family Dynamics in an Extended Household: The Briffaults of Montigny-aux-Amognes,” “Work Songs and Peasant Visions of the Social Order” and “The Visionary World of the Vallave Lacemaker.” His interpretations of the archival records offer ideas about how the folk were able to challenge authority figures from a position of safety, negotiate inequalities within their own families, maintain communal bonds despite often trying conditions, and achieve strategic marital alliances. More broadly, he shows how traditional oral forms stories, songs and riddles—provided viable mechanisms through which the poor were able to assert some degree of control over their own destinies.

Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University.

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Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, “Minitel: Welcome to the Internet” (MIT Press, 2017)

Thu, 21 Dec 2017 19:10:44 -0000

When discussing Internet history, many within the United States believe the creation myth of an Internet born in Silicon Valley. But aspects of the Internet that we use for shopping, financial transactions, and social interactions, among other things, have roots in technological advances from other countries. In particular, 15 years before most Americans were online, the French government backed a communications technology, the Minitel, that revolutionized social, political, and financial interactions. In Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (MIT Press, 2017), Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll discuss the creation and spread of the Minitel and the particular influence it had on France, and ultimately what we call the Internet. In so doing the authors offer lessons for current regulatory debates.

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Michel Leiris, “Phantom Africa” (Seagull Books, 2017)

Wed, 20 Dec 2017 11:00:41 -0000

Between 1931 and 1933, French writer Michel Leiris participated in a state-sponsored expedition to document the cultural practices of people in west and east Africa. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti employed some questionable, unethical methods to dispossess African communities of their cultural and religious artifacts and artwork. In his capacity as secretary-archivist, Leiris recorded the events, actions and observations of the mission in great detail, in a daily journal that would become L’Afrique fantome. Leiris was both critical of and to an extent complicit in the exploitative encounter between French ethnographers and the colonized people they sought to study. His journal reveals the tensions between Europe’s claims about the superiority of its civilization and the violence and barbarity of colonialism on the ground. It also bears witness to the process by which some of the holdings in the Quai Branly museum in Paris today, were taken as booty (or in Leiris’ words, “butin”) from the African continent in the early twentieth century.

Brent Edward’s Phantom Africa (Seagull Books, 2017) makes L’Afrique fantome available to English-speaking readers in its entirety for the first time. This translation presents an important and invaluable archive that documents the makings of ethnography as a field of study, as well its imbrication with colonial conquest and imperialism. In a thoughtful introduction that examines the historical context of Leiris’ journey, his personal motivations, his use of language, his triumphs and frustrations, Edwards clearly lays out the importance of this text for readers interested in anthropology, literary studies and the history of colonial encounters.

Brent Hayes Edwards was awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for Phantom Africa. He is also the author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2017) and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. OMeally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). His research and teaching focus on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz.

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Christopher Church, “Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean” (U. Nebraska Press, 2017)

Mon, 18 Dec 2017 11:00:50 -0000

Hurricanes, fires, a volcano eruption: disasters are political, as Christopher Church argues. His new book, Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), elaborates on the particular politics of catastrophe in the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Using an array of methods ranging from close reading of texts to GIS mapping to digital analysis of language, Church tells a compelling story of the relationships between citizenship, race, and natural disasters. The peculiar journey of these colonies as they became departments of France was shaped by responses to devastating events. This book conjured those events in vivid detail and opens up new ways to understand them.

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Kathryn Brown. ed., “Perspectives on Degas” (Routledge, 2016)

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 17:02:11 -0000

Edgar Degas died in the fall of 1917. Marking this 100th anniversary, Kathryn Brown‘s edited collection, Perspectives on Degas (Routledge, 2016) brings together a range of authors and methodologies to consider the French artist in context, to examine aspects of his practice in terms of form and technique, and to think and rethink critical approaches to Degas and his legacies. Working in Europe, North America, and Asia, the volume’s fascinating and provocative essays introduce the reader to the artist in a number of ways while building on, responding to, and challenging some of the traditions and conclusions of previous Degas scholarship.

Featuring an introduction as well an essay by its editor, the collection is divided into three parts. In the first section, Art in Context; Gender, Race, and Labour, authors Norma Broude, Shao-Chien Tseng, Mary Hunter, and Anthea Callen examine Degas’s representation of working women and horses, racecourses, the “cafe-concert,” female spectators, and circus performers. The second part of the book, Making and Materiality highlights the production and physicality of the art that Degas produced as objects. Exploring the relationship of Degas’s painting to photography, the internal structures of his sculptures, and aspects of his printmaking and illustration, the essays by Marni Reva Kessler, Patricia Failing, Jonas Beyer, and Brown herself, are analyses grounded in the very practical and technical aspects of what and how the artist made. In the third section of the book, Writing Degas, authors Ruth Iskin, Heather Dawkins, and Anna Gruetz Robbins all pursue the testimonies and criticism of Degas’s friends, colleagues, and art historians, as well as his own reflections on his relationships, and the studio space where he worked. Moving in many different directions, the essays nevertheless cohere as a set with the aim of complicating our understanding of the artist, reconsidering previous assumptions, and opening up new questions about his oeuvre. This was my first interview with an author/editor of a collection and it was a pleasure learning more about how this group of essays came together in such an impressive volume.

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Stuart Elden, “Foucault: The Birth of Power” (Polity Press, 2017)

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 15:54:55 -0000

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Regine Jean-Charles, “Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary” (OSU Press, 2014)

Thu, 26 Oct 2017 22:15:42 -0000

Regine Jean-Charles’ Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014) foregrounds black women as speaking subjects in narrating and protesting sexual violence. Jean-Charles emphasizes a transnational black feminist framework that makes a critical intervention in rape cultural criticism. She contends in this work that taking rape as a starting point to theorize colonial and postcolonial violence provides a more effective way to understand the gendered contours of violence. Drawing on a range of primary sources including novels, photographs and films from Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, Jean-Charles highlights the global implications of sexual violence and the importance of paying attention to its representation in order to rethink the very fundamental notions of human rights.

Regine Michelle Jean-Charles is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College where she teaches classes on francophone literature, black feminisms, African film, and Haitian Studies.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Narratives of Resistance in the Francophone World examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements.

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Andrew Smith, “Terror and Terroir: The Winegrowers of the Languedoc and Modern France” (Manchester University Press, 2016)

Fri, 06 Oct 2017 10:00:51 -0000

Andrew Smith‘s Terror and Terroir: The Winegrowers of the Languedoc and Modern France (Manchester University Press, 2016) is a political history of wine radicalism. Focused on the producers rather than the consumers of what Roland Barthes famously referred to as the nation’s “totem-drink,” Terror and Terroir examines wine politics and activisms in the Languedoc following the Second World War. In a first chapter, Smith looks closely at the memory and legacy of the “Grand Revolt of 1907,” a series of major protests that became a cornerstone of winegrower mythology in the post-45 period. Tracing the evolution of the winegrowers’ movement in the region from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s, the book looks at a variety of groups and organizations that sought to represent the interests of producers. After 1961, the Comite Regional d’Action Viticole (CRAV) dominated the scene.

Over the course of the next two decades, the CRAV engaged in a variety of forms of direct action that came to a head with the “Gunfight” at Montredon in 1976. Thinking carefully about the political violence of this and other milestone moments, the book also looks at the intersection of the Occitan and radical viticulture movements; the impact of changes at the national level on regional lives and politics; and the effects of the major forces of modernization, European integration, and globalization. Drawing on a range of material from national and regional archives and press sources to oral history interviews, Terror and Terroir combines complex and compelling storytelling with careful historical and political analysis of a movement that mobilized thousands of French citizens over decades. The book has much to offer readers interested in the histories of wine and political radicalism (in equal measure!).

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of French culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.

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Paige Bowers, “The General’s Niece: The Little-Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France” (Chicago Review Press, 2017)

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 16:37:01 -0000

When Charles de Gaulle issued his famous call in June 1940 for the French people to continue fighting Nazi Germany, among those within Occupied France who took up the cause was his young niece Genevieve. In The General’s Niece: The Little Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France (Chicago Review Press, 2017), Paige Bowers tells the story of her life, one lived in perilous times. The daughter of Charles’s oldest brother Xavier, when war broke out Genevieve found herself buffeted by the dislocations that resulted. In the aftermath of the German conquest, she moved from small acts of individual defiance to full participation in the burgeoning Resistance movement, where she helped to educate her countrymen about her previously obscure uncle. Though her possession of the de Gaulle name often drew unwanted attention from the Occupation authorities, she found daring ways to use it to her advantage. Genevieve’s arrest in June 1943 led to her detention in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, an experience which as Bowers shows fueled her postwar activities on behalf of her fellow Resistance detainees, as well as her subsequent activism to fight to end chronic poverty.

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T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, “Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars (SUNY Press, 2015)

Sat, 26 Aug 2017 18:04:12 -0000

When Dorothy Sterling wrote her book about nineteenth-century black women in America, she stated in the introduction that the book was not a definitive history of black women but a sourcebook to lead others to “compile a complete history.” And while a complete history of black women has not yet been written, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting has added to the history of black women in Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris Between the Two World Wars and The Autobiography of Ada Bricktop Smith, or Miss Baker Regrets (SUNY Press, 2015). Sharpley-Whiting does two things with this book; she appeals to the scholar and the mystery reader. The first part of the book captures the multi-life history of twenty-five African American women who lived in Paris as artists, singers, club owners, poets, and writers. Sharpley-Whiting’s stories illustrate how travel and place were transformative for black women despite the length of their stay in Paris. She says, “the book is a moment in time.” In this book, we get to go into that world, a world where they were honored and treated not by the color of their skin, but by their talents. We get to meet many different women along the way. Some stayed for a long time, while others could only stay several months before returning back to the United States. By the end of the 1930s, their time was over.

The second part of Bricktop’s Paris is a noir mystery, titled The Autobiography of Ada Bricktop Smith, or Miss Baker Regrets. Sharpley-Whiting illuminates the lines of fact and fiction in the autobiography of Ada Bricktop Smith. The novel explores the black and feminine perspective of image, self-possession, and self-exhibition. The novel takes us to Paris with black American women in salons and saloons crossing boundaries with purpose, and discovering they are the wealth of the nation. Josie Baker and Bricktop what are they up to? And who did it?

Bricktop’s Paris was an American Library in Paris Book Award Long List selection and a Choice 2015 Outstanding Academic Title. Sharpley-Whiting is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and French at Vanderbilt University where she also chairs African American and Diaspora Studies and directs the Callie House Center for the Study of Global Black Cultures and Politics. She publishes an academic murder mystery series under the nom de plume Tracy Whiting. She also teaches a course on Detective Fiction at Vanderbilt. The first novel, an academic cozy-thriller set in the South of France with Professor Havilah Gaie, is titled The 13thFellow: A Mystery in Provence (BooksbNimble Press, May 2015). She has completed the second mystery in this series, Paris A-Go-Go (Books nimble Press, forthcoming 2016), and is currently at-work on a scholarly volume, A Quartet in Four French Movements: A Voodoo Queen, A French Romantic, a Poet, and an African Ethnologist, as well as a family history. She is on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (2014-2018).

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Lori Marso, “Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter” (Duke UP, 2017)

Mon, 21 Aug 2017 10:00:17 -0000

Lori Marso’s new book, Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter (Duke University Press, 2017), delves into Simone de Beauvoir’s political thought, feminism, and activism. The text is a fascinating exploration of these topics and complexities, but Marso takes Beauvoir’s work even further, connecting these concepts to what Marso has defined as the encounter interpreting Beauvoir’s account of the idea of freedom and the experience of freedom not only as an individual but in its relationality. Marso’s impressive engagement with Beauvoir is not just in exploring the theoretical partnering that Beauvoir has with her intellectual contemporaries like Richard Wright and Frantz Fanon, but also in putting Beauvoir into conversation with other theorists and artists, like Lars von Trier–through Beauvoir’s work on Marquis de Sade, or Allison Bechdel–as a fellow feminist theorist, or Hannah Arendt–on the topic of confronting evil and violence. The book is structured into three sections, focusing the reader’s attention on the concepts of enemies, allies, and friends, and how these personal relationships are, by definition, political, and how Beauvoir’s work and thought can and should be used to analyze contemporary cultural artifacts as well as the urgent issues of her day. Marso interrogate Beauvoir’s concept of freedom but not without also connecting that concept to its relational engagement with violence, with oppression, with colonialism, and with the broader expanse of how we think about ourselves within personal and political structures and encounters.

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Maurice Samuels, “The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

Mon, 14 Aug 2017 10:00:14 -0000

In The Right To Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Maurice Samuels, Betty Jane Anylan Professor of French and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism at Yale University, demonstrates that Jewish difference has always been essential to the elaboration of French universalism. Looking at novelists, philosophers, filmmakers and political figures Samuels recovers the forgotten history of a more open, pluralistic form of French universalism. This is sure to become a classic and essential text.

Max Kaiser is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au.

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Matthew Gillis, “Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 21:56:49 -0000

In the popular imagination, heresy belongs to the Christian Middle Ages in much the way that the Crusades or courtly culture do. Non-specialists in the medieval field may assume that the problem of heresy always existed, uniformly, throughout the period. But as Matthew Gillis shows in Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford University Press, 2017), in the age of Charlemagne and his descendants, heretics were largely “seen as either distant foreign dangers or the legendary villains of ancient church lore.”

That is, until around 840 CE, when one Gottschalk of Orbais began preaching what he called twin predestination. Gottschalk was heavily influenced by Augustine, who had argued that long before time began, God already ordained who would be among the elect and who among the damned. Gottschalk’s twin predestination theology made him into a figure Professor Gillis refers to as a “religious outlaw,” a “heretic in the flesh,” the Carolingian Empire’s foremost religious dissenter.

Heresy & Dissent in the Carolingian Empire is a fascinating study of a figure whose meaning has been debated for centuries, but whose own moment in the 840s reveals a world beset with fears of sin and pollution.

Matthew Gillis is Assistant Professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

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Alexia Yates, “Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siecle Capital” (Harvard UP, 2015)

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 21:56:14 -0000

What comes to mind when you think of Paris in the nineteenth century? For me, its revolutionary politics, the circulation of increasing numbers of people and goods, a range of spectacular cultural displays and amusements, an emergent urban modernity including a host of negotiations between social classes, public and private, men and women, citizens and the state. And if I had to name one historical figure to stand for the transformation of the nineteenth-century capital? Haussmann. Hands down.

Alexia Yates‘s book, Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siecle Capital (Harvard UP, 2015), opened my eyes to a whole other world of everyday urbanism and historical actors in the city during the first decades of the Third Republic. Acknowledging the undeniable impact of Haussmann and Haussmannization on the city that Paris became under and after the Second Empire, Selling Paris considers the activities, interests, and effects of a host of other figures who shaped the city’s property relations and commercial culture from the early years of the Third Republic to the First World War. In the books chapters, readers will find a social history of the business of French building during this period, from planning and production to use. Focused on the architects, private developers, municipal authorities, speculators, real estate agents, notaries, property owners, and tenants whose interactions and negotiations influenced the form, representation, and experience of Parisian real estate in purposeful ways, the book makes significant contributions to our understanding of the history of the capital and capitalism in France.

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Allan H. Pasco, “Balzac, Literary Sociologist” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 18:36:38 -0000

In Balzac, Literary Sociologist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Allan H. Pasco explores the talents of the writer whose reputation has been primarily based on his extraordinary gift to compose captivating stories. In his meticulously conducted research, Allan Pasco argues that Honor de Balzac was not only a storyteller: he was “a sociologist avant l’heure” (113) and “a competent historian” (234).

Balzac, Literary Sociologist offers a detailed analysis of more than ten literary pieces. While emphasizing Balzac’s mastery in managing plots and narratives, Allan Pasco invites his readers to pay close attention to the aspects that help reconstruct historical and sociocultural environments of nineteenth-century France. Undergoing a tumultuous period that involved a number of deep, drastic and dramatic changes, France was struggling with the rudiments of the past that were holding back the development of the country; at the same time, new developments did not effectively contribute to the construction of a stable society: a vision of the future was blurry.

A conflict of the old and the young, involving a wide array of themes and motives, appears to epitomize the disruptions defining nineteenth-century French society. Poverty, corruption, ambitions of the aristocracy, despair of the poor signaled the old’s inability (and lack of willingness and desire) to implement new and productive changes; the young, on the other hand, more often than not lacked knowledge and experience to overcome stagnation. Moreover, disruptions were augmented by the loss of moral virtues: honesty, benevolence, dignity, kindness, love were often sacrificed for money that became a new god. In his analysis, Allan Pasco offers a new reading of Balzac’s works which can be considered acute and insightful commentaries on the phenomena outlining a transformational period in the history of French society. In addition to the predictable topics (class, aristocracy, church and religion, the rich and the poor, etc.), Balzac, Literary Sociologist includes insightful explorations of topics which appear to be rather symptomatic in terms of the society’s crises: suicide, failed marriages, fatherless children, the stagnation of the province and the hardships of the city life. Allan Pasco also draws attention to Balzac’s comments on life in Paris: Paris is presented as a significant locus epitomizing struggles of the country and of the individual.

Undoubtedly, historical and sociocultural permutations involve not only society but the individual as well. As Allan Pasco’s research demonstrates, Balzac through his individual stories, which, at a larger scale, constitute an extensive vision of the society and the world, was responding to the historical environment that was shaping the individuals inner world. From this perspective, Balzac’s works highlight the interconnectedness of the inside and outside worlds: captivating stories are pretexts to sociological and philosophical speculations and observations. In his book, Allan Pasco states that Balzac was a sociologist and a historian: in this interview, the author adds that Balzac was “a great historian.” Balzac, Literary Sociologist proves inexhaustible potential and power of literature.

Allan H. Pasco is the Hall Distinguished Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Kansas.

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Bruno Perreau, “Queer Theory: The French Response” (Stanford UP, 2016)

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 10:00:36 -0000

At once wonderfully clear and bursting with complexity, the title of Bruno Perreau‘s book, Queer Theory: The French Response (Stanford University Press, 2016) is one of my favorites of the past several years. An interrogation of the meanings of queer, theory, French, and response, the book is anchored around the anti-gay marriage demonstrations and activisms that proliferated in France during the lead-up to the passage of the 2013 Loi Taubira (a.k.a. “marriage pour tous”). The book focuses on a central claim of French opponents of gay marriage and adoption: the notion that (American) gender and queer theory is responsible for spreading homosexuality in France, and has thus contributed to the undoing of the French family and the nation as a whole.

Throughout its four chapters, the book considers the French response to queer theory in terms of fantasy and echo. This is not a book about reception in a passive or uncomplicated sense. Rather it is the study of a set of reverberations back and forth across the Atlantic that is always already a matter of translation and interpretation. Indeed, the so-called American theory that anti-gay activists have presented as a foreign menace finds much of its own inspiration in the work of French thinkers and writers. Drawing in part on a series of interviews with French feminist and queer intellectuals and activists, the book also offers critical insight regarding the meanings and anxieties surrounding minority identities and communities in contemporary France. Queer Theory will be compelling reading to anyone interested in the history and politics of sexuality, and in the possibilities of thinking and enacting change into the future, in France, in the U.S., and beyond.

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Rebecca Scales, “Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

Thu, 13 Apr 2017 17:46:19 -0000

What did sound mean to French people as radio and other listening technologies began to proliferate in the early twentieth century? What was the nature and significance of French auditory culture in the years between the two world wars? These are two of the central questions that Rebecca Scales pursues in her new book, Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2016). This is not a book focused on the institutional history or content of French radio during this period, however. Rather, Scales examines closely a range of ideas about sound and the development of what she calls the “radio nation,” a space of listening, cultural identity, and citizenship. Access to the airwaves, the “right to listen,” and the question of whether radio did or did not reflect the nation and its different members became vital areas of discussion and debate in the 1920 and 30s.

Radio and the Politics…explores the dynamic history of radio at a critical juncture in modern French political and cultural history. Its chapters explore the perspectives of sound producers and consumers, including broadcasters, politicians, educators, medical professionals, radio amateurs, disabled veterans, and a variety of other listeners throughout France. The book considers the broad space of the radio soundscape from Paris to the provinces, and the movement of sound waves beyond/across the borders of “metropolitan” France, in Algeria, and to and from other nations. Along the way, the book delves into a range of themes: postwar recovery, class and political differences, the relationship of individual bodies to the national body, tensions between public and private spaces and interests, and state control and surveillance. At once a history of the senses and technology, of French politics, culture and everyday life, this compelling book will be of great interest to readers (and listeners!) across multiple fields.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Michaela DeSoucey, “Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food” (Princeton UP, 2016)

Sat, 25 Mar 2017 11:29:24 -0000

A heritage food in France, and a high-priced obscurity in the United States. But in both countries, foie gras, the specially fattened liver of a duck or goose, has the power to stir a remarkable array of emotions and produce heated debates. Comparing the French and American producers and consumers of this controversial food item, Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food (Princeton University Press, 2016) offers readers a broad mix of these perspectives under a clear, rich analysis. Assistant Professor Michaela DeSoucey takes readers to the farms in southwest France, where ducks are force-fed with tubes placed down their throats, and into the high-end restaurants in Chicago, where foie gras was temporarily banned in the 2000s and made an object of fascination. Her aim is to show how we could use what she calls gastropolitics, or the conflicts over food and culinary practices that get branded as social problems and lie at the intersection of social movements, cultural markets, and government regulation, to understand the implications and impacts these contestations have for social life in a variety of contexts. The result is a highly informative and entertaining journey through the social and symbolic terrain surrounding foie gras. Readers will truly learn a lot from liver.

Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.

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Sarah Hammerschlag, “Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion” (Columbia UP, 2016)

Mon, 20 Mar 2017 10:00:56 -0000

In Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016), Sarah Hammerschlag, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School, explores the admiring and at times oppositional philosophical kinship between Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, two of the France’s greatest 20th century philosophers. One fundamental aspect of the Levinas-Derrida relationship is each man’s relationship to his Jewish identity and to Jewish text and tradition. Professor Hammerschlag delves into the resonances and far-reaching effects this relationship has for religion writ large, as well as for philosophy, literature, ethics, and political theology.

David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research interests center on the influence of rabbinic midrash on the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu.

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Mark Braude, “Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle” (Simon and Schuster, 2016)

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 21:13:23 -0000

Mark Braude’s Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle (Simon and Schuster, 2016) tells the captivating story of the rise of Monte Carlo as Europe’s most famous casino-resort from the second half of the nineteenth century to the end of the 1920s. In a series of fascinating chapters, Braude takes readers through the history of this modern, luxury playground, from the legalization of gambling in Monaco in 1855, through a rise of the site in the decades that followed, a period of decline after the First World War, and a revival during the Jazz Age of the interwar years.

Throughout, Making Monte Carlo follows the lives of individuals, families, companies, and a larger network of player-consumers, workers, and witnesses. Center-stage are the members of the Blanc family who first opened Le Grand Casino de Monte Carlo in 1858 and controlled the Societe des bains de mers (SBM). The SBM is Braude’s main archival source for the inside story of casino plans, management, and operations. The book also engages the lives and interests of the Grimaldis, the dynasty that presided over the tiny principality that became a haven for gaming and entertainments, a center of risk and adventure, of fantasy and speed. And then there are those who came to game, to work, to be entertained, and to watch. A number of participants would tell their stories, contributing to a mythologizing that made of Monte Carlo a destination whose imaginative dimensions exceeded by far its physical area.

Making Monte Carlo is at once a history of commercial and business interests and of the rapid and remarkable changes in modern culture that took place in the period covered by Braude’s chapters. This was an era of the proliferation of mass spectacle, of advertising and marketing, of innovations in the technologies of leisure, recreation, transport, and tourism. It was an age that saw the emergence of new forms of capitalist exploitation and imagination, of transformations in the idea of selling and in the selling of ideas. Considering the impact of Monte Carlo’s development on tourists rich and less-so, on the workers who made the casinos, hotels, and clubs run, and on all those (in Monaco and beyond its small territory) who witnessed the spectacle as it unfolded, the book will be a compelling read to anyone interested in the place itself, as well as all those cultural dreams it has sought to encourage and represent since its inauguration as a high-end, high-stakes capital.

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Alexandra Deutsch, “A Woman of Two Worlds: Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte” (Maryland Historical Society, 2016)

Sat, 21 Jan 2017 11:00:16 -0000

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte was a celebrity in 19th century America thanks in no small measure to her brief marriage to Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest brother Jerome. In A Woman of Two Worlds: Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (Maryland Historical Society, 2016), Alexandra Deutsch draws upon the documents and artifacts Elizabeth’s family donated to describe her life. The daughter of a wealthy American merchant, her charm and beauty captivated Jerome, who married her in 1803 only to leave her and her unborn two years later at the emperors insistence. Though the Bonapartes sought to distance themselves from Elizabeth, she spent the next several decades doggedly fighting to win acceptance of her son and his children as members of the Bonaparte line, all while building a fortune of her own. Deutsch details these efforts by using Elizabeth’s possessions to describe the various ways in which she associated herself with the Bonaparte family, an effort that was every bit as important to her as the ongoing legal struggle to confirm her son’s legitimacy.

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David Shafer, “Antonin Artaud” (Reaktion/U Chicago Press, 2016)

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 02:11:00 -0000

“Artaud lived with his neck placed firmly in the noose.”

-Bauhaus*

David Shafer’s new biography, Antonin Artaud (Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press, 2016), situates the life of this enigmatic and fascinating figure in historical context. From his bourgeois family background, through a life that included a variety of physical and mental health challenges, drug use, and institutionalization, Shafer traces the ways that Artaud’s intellectual and artistic development was shaped by broader historical and political events and forces. An actor of stage and screen, a poet, and theatre director, Artaud emerges in these chapters as the embodiment of the French revolutionary tradition in the cultural realm. Shafer traces his subjects geographic movements from his Mediterranean origins to the streets of Paris, and on to other destinations, Mexico and Ireland among these. In addition to these sites, Artaud held in his imagination a number of other locales, including the physical and cultural landscapes of an East that informed his critique of Western society and its traditions.

Throughout the book, Shafer takes Artaud on his own terms, avoiding judgments and hasty conclusions about the ideas, beliefs, and experiences of his protagonist. The result is an empathetic, yet still critical, biography of an icon of the world of performance. Readers not familiar with Artaud’s far-reaching influence across the domains of art, music, literature, theatre, and film up to the present will find much in these pages to justify his consideration as one of the most important cultural players of the last century.

*After our interview, David shared the link to Aural Assault, a blog post on Artaud and music that he wrote for the Reaktion Books website. In it, he discusses the music he listened to while writing the biography, as well as the links between Artaud and musicians like Richard Hell and Patti Smith.

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Jennifer L. Palmer, “Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic” (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2016)

Sat, 17 Dec 2016 13:34:19 -0000

Jennifer Palmer’s new book, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), uses the stories of two extraordinary families as the point of departure for a study of the ways that household relationships, and the intimacy they entailed, shaped understandings of race, gender and slavery in the 18th century French Atlantic. Palmer analyzes the bonds of friendship, servitude, sex, and godparentage as they related to shifts in legal regimes regulating slavery. Her reliance on sources including correspondence and wills makes for rich storytelling about the complex lives of enslaved people and their owners, as both enabling and undermining of racial and gendered hierarchies.

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Kathryn Kleppinger, “Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and Media in France, 1983-2013” (Liverpool UP, 2015)

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 16:22:13 -0000

Kathryn Kleppinger’s Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983-2013 (Liverpool University Press, 2015) examines the “paradox of ethnic minority writing” in the work of multiple authors of North African descent over a thirty-year period. Organized chronologically as a series of portraits, the book’s chapters deal with the literary (and filmic) output of an impressive number of writers, including Mehdi Charef, Azouz Begag, Farida Belghoul, Soraya Nini, Samira Bellil, Rachid Djaidani,Faiza Guene, and Sabri Loutah. Considering literary works themselves, as well as the audio-visual media representation of texts and authors on French TV and radio, Kleppinger’s analysis pushes back against the tendency to understand “beur” literature in exclusively social and political terms at the expense of aesthetic or artistic readings.

Drawing on a range of sources, from literature to television and radio archives, to interviews Kleppinger conducted with the authors themselves, the book weaves together the analysis of form and content, spoken word and gesture, personal and professional biography, representational and political strategies and effects. Exploring the categories that have simultaneously gained these authors and texts attention and limited the ways they have been understood, Branding the Beur Author moves across three decades of tremendous change in contemporary France. Its pages explore the work of both men and women writing, reading, and interrogating the “beur”as a social and literary identity in a nation engaged both historically and currently in crucial debates regarding the meanings of difference.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. Please drop her a line at panchasi@sfu.ca if you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast.

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Caroline Ford, “Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France” (Harvard UP, 2016)

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 22:09:22 -0000

Caroline Ford’s Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France (Harvard University Press, 2016) explores the roots of French environmental consciousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Far from being a product of the postwar environmental movement, Ford shows how French society began to understand how humans adversely affected their surroundings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Popular writers like Francois-Antoine Rauch demonstrated how deforestation altered the climate and damaged the habitability of the nation. War, revolution, and a series of devastating floods brought the questions of deforestation, urbanization, and industrial capitalism into conflict with the finite resources of nature. Public worries over resource depletion and climate change mingled with a new bourgeois consciousness developing in the nineteenth century. France’s countryside became a place of romantic longing for families, a source of inspiration for artists, and an important symbol of national pride. Historical landmarks became sites of a unique French heritage to be preserved and protected for future generations. Empire also became a site of environmental sensitivity, where the conflicting interests of Europeans and colonized peoples played out through discourses of conservation and ecological change in French Algeria.

James Esposito is a historian and researcher interested in digital history, empire, and the history of technology. James can be reached via email at espositojamesj@gmail.com and on Twitter @james_esposito_

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Emile Chabal, “A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

Wed, 24 Aug 2016 13:17:29 -0000

Emile Chabal’s A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an in-depth analysis of the languages and preoccupations of French civil society and political culture from the 1970s to the present. Picking up where many historical studies leave off, the book pursues the legacies of the period of France’s Trente Glorieuses, including a number of critical political shifts and turning points during the last four decades. A study focused on French elites, the book moves from consideration of the contributions of intellectuals, academics, and journalists, to the ways that changing ideas and vocabularies played out in the everyday life of French politics.

Concerned with the broad consensual middle ground of French politics since the 1970s, the book is divided into two parts: the first examines French neo-republicanism in the wake of De Gaulle, while the second looks at a range of liberal critiques of the varieties of that republicanism. Seeking to push past traditional categories of left and right in the French context, the book looks closely at how actors across the political middle responded to the major issues that seemed to most challenge definitions of national identity. Considering the impact of postcolonialism in debates about laicite, integration, and immigration, A Divided Republic also looks at parite, the idea of the Anglo-Saxon in French political discourse, the question of regional differences, and the role of the language of crisis in state reform. Attentive to the always evolving and contested meanings of ideologies, terminologies, and their strategic deployment, the book will be highly compelling reading for anyone interested how the political thinks, speaks, and acts in contemporary France.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. Please drop her a line at panchasi@sfu.ca if you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast.

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Kieko Matteson, “Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 15:33:41 -0000

Kieko Matteson’s Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an impressive study of the economic and political vitality of the forest, from the reign of Louis XIV through the middle of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Franche-Comte region, the book explores the meanings and values of the forest to a range of stakeholders– the state, landowners, manufacturers, and peasants–all of whom sought varying modes and degrees of control over Frances woodland resources and spaces. Examining key moments in the states attempt to manage the forest, the book pays close attention to local forms of response and resistance to interventions such as the Ordinance of 1669 and the Forest Code of 1827.

Revealing the deeply political significance of environmental resources and concerns throughout a period of revolutionary upheaval, including shifts from monarchy to republic to empire, and back again, Forests in Revolutionary France is a book that reminds us of the connections and tensions between the histories of central authorities and everyday lives, between private and public interests, and between tradition and modernity in the discourses and practices of conservation, community, and property over two centuries. Examining the long and complex history that notions of preservation and degradation have had in France, as elsewhere, the book also contributes to our understanding of contemporary concerns over the uses and abuses of the forest in an era of increasing awareness of climate change and the need for more sustainable alternatives to existing/previous approaches to the natural environment.

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Ethan Katz, “The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France” (Harvard UP, 2015)

Tue, 28 Jun 2016 19:12:58 -0000

In The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015), Ethan Katz examines and interrogates Jewish-Muslim relations from 1914 to the present. Arguing that interactions between Jews and Muslims must be understood in and through the respective, changing statuses and relationships of both communities to the French state, The Burdens of Brotherhood pursues the history of this “triangular affair.” Drawing on a range of archival, press and media sources, as well as oral interviews, the book emphasizes everyday lives and mutual perceptions in and between spaces private and public, local and transnational. Its chapters move from the diversity and legacies of wartime experiences, to family and community gathering places in three different French cities (Paris, Strasbourg, and Marseille), to the routes and mobilities of people, cultures, and politics across the Mediterranean. The Burdens of Brotherhood revisits the First World War, the interwar years, the period of Vichy and the Occupation, the French-Algerian War, and the final decades of the twentieth century. It also traces the impact of international movements and politics on ethno-religious communities and identities in the French context, from forms of Zionism and anti-imperialism to the vicissitudes of the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948. Towards the end of our conversation, Ethan and I had a chance to speak about the recent French past, including the events of January 2015 that he addresses in the book’s conclusion. Written with the present in mind, The Burdens of Brotherhood offers vital historical perspective and insight on issues of urgent concern with important implications for the future.

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Jeremy Ahearne, “Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 14:37:57 -0000

How did two right wing presidents use culture to govern France? In Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Jeremy Ahearne, a Professor of French Studies and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, explores are range of examples to probe the decade of Right Wing government between 2002 and 2012. Drawing on the implicit/explicit distinction in cultural policy studies, Ahearne considers how core cultural concepts have changed in France, for example the French idea of ‘laicity’ and state secularism, as well as discussing specific cultural examples. These include television and media policy, museum building, eduction policy and the political uses of French history. Overall the book is framed by the continuities and differences between the Chriac and Sarkozy regimes in France, along with the struggle for hegemony over culture and thus over government. The book will be of interest to cultural policy, cultural and media studies and French scholars, as well as those interested in examples of the governmental use of culture.

Dave O’Brien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr. Peter Matthews). He tweets @Drdaveobrien.

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Kristin Ross, “Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune” (Verso, 2015)

Sat, 28 May 2016 12:45:00 -0000

One hundred and forty-five years ago this week, the French state massacred thousands of its own people during the semaine sanglante (bloody week) of the Paris Commune. Kristin Ross’ Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso Books, 2015) pushes readers to consider Communard thought and actions in a frame that moves beyond the 72 days that traditionally define (and confine) the Commune as an event. This is a Commune that begins with the meetings and reunions of the 1860s rather than the states attempted seizure of the cannons protecting the capital in March 1871. Extending the spatial and temporal bounds of the Commune to include the lifetime of its participants and supporters within and beyond Paris, Communal Luxury opens up new possibilities for our historical understanding of 1871. It also renders visible and analyzes a neglected archive of Communard thought as a resource for contemporary political struggles and activisms in the 21st century. Liberating the Commune from both the French national republican histories that have attempted to incorporate it, and histories of state communism that have cast the Commune as the failed precursor to 1917, Ross pursues the lived and conceived history of a set of events that have gained mythological status in the century and a half since their unfolding. The book directs our attention to the ideas and perspectives of a range of actors and thinkers: Elisabeth Dmitrieff, Eugene Poittier, Elisee Reclus, Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and Karl Marx. From the Communard call for a Universal Republic, to new programs for education and the arts (including an aspiration to the public beauty of communal luxury), to shifting visions of the possibilities of revolution and solidarity into the future, the book explores what Marx referred to as the working existence of the Commune. More a study of the theory and political praxis of the movement than a history of the Paris Commune in a traditional sense, the book illuminates the past while speaking to the present in profound ways.

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Nicole Rudolph, “At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort” (Berghahn Books, 2015)

Tue, 17 May 2016 11:25:20 -0000

Nicole Rudolph‘s At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort (Berghahn Books, 2015) contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the three decades after 1945 known as the Trente glorieuses. Rudolph’s emphasis is on French designs and experiences of dwelling, and the interior spaces of French homes in particular. The book argues that housing was essential to the modernizing project that French society engaged in during these years, a vital site of reconstruction in the wake of the Second World War, and a key locus of nation-building and democratization. In this period, the French state actively pursued policies that sought to guarantee its citizens the right to safe, hygienic, and comfortable homes that would nurture individual happiness while helping to strengthen families as the building blocks of a thriving society.

From the creation of a Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism in 1945, to the housing crisis of 1953, to the yearly Salon des arts menagers promoting new household methods and technologies, to the oil crisis of the early 1970s, At Home in Postwar France examines the class, gender, and design ideals and tensions of a France in the throes of major transformations on multiple fronts. Pursuing the diffusion, mediation, and reception of the new housing forms that developed in the period, the book considers the contributions of state officials, architects and designers, and proponents of domestic economy and organization in France. It also examines the reactions of the residents and social commentators who felt and evaluated the impact of these forms. At Home in Postwar France explores a range of hopes and dreams for modern French living spaces, thinking through a variety of new approaches to housing on a mass scale. Taking on the complicated relationship between home and citizenship in postwar France, the book offers readers new perspective on how French women and men dwelt and thought about dwelling during this critical period in the nations history.

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Michael Broer, “Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny” (Pegasus, 2015)

Fri, 13 May 2016 18:01:56 -0000

Most biographers writing about the life and achievements of Napoleon Bonaparte have focused on his dramatic personality or his military campaigns. In Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny (Pegasus, 2015) the inaugural volume of a projected three-volume biography of the French ruler Michael Broers’ takes a different approach. Drawing upon a new and vastly expanded collection of Napoleons letters to chronicle his subjects life from his early years in Corsica to the eve of his 1805 campaign, Broers focuses on his achievements in politics and state-building. He sees Napoleon’s time as conqueror and ruler of Italy as key both to his emergence as a prospective leader and to the development of his ideas of governance. Though applied bluntly in Egypt, their legacy in Napoleons development of the French state during his subsequent years as First Consul and as emperor are made clear by the author, who details how they created not just the structure of administration France uses to this day but more modern and uniform states throughout much of Europe as well.

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Michael Goebel, “Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 09:58:50 -0000

Michael Goebel‘s Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015) thinks globally while focusing on the local, everyday histories of non-Europeans in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. Examining the myriad ways that Paris functioned as a hatchery or clearinghouse for the development of anti-imperial ideas and movements, the book argues that the social history of migration is central to any understanding of the political and intellectual histories of nationalism, from the interwar years through the period of decolonizations that followed the Second World War.

Anti-Imperial Metropolis traces the experiences and statuses of different categories of non-Europeans in the city, groups identified variously as French citizens, colonial subjects, and foreigners. Interested in how non-European students, workers, and activists from various parts of the globe met and interacted in Paris, the book details how politicization happened when it did, and how differences between communities revealed crucial inconsistencies and contradictions in the ideological underpinnings and workings of imperialism itself. Moving from the private worlds of non-Europeans as they lived day-to-day in the city, to the work of mutual aid associations, to the impact these communities and their exchanges could have on international diplomacy, the book reveals much about the imbrication of culture and politics. Drawing on a wealth of archival material from several countries, Anti-Imperial Metropolis offers readers new perspective on Paris’ interwar past while making a significant contribution to the transnational history of empires and their undoings.

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Allison Drew, “We Are No Longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria” (Manchester UP, 2014)

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 12:47:20 -0000

Allison Drew‘s We Are No Longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria (Manchester University Press, 2014) traces the long, complex history of communism in Algeria throughout the colonial period. Rethinking the “narratives of failure” that have hitherto dominated studies of the Communist Party of Algeria (PCA), the book looks at the movement “on its own terms,” rather than as a mere political subsidiary of the French Communist Party (PCF).

Examining the role of the French state in suppressing communism in Algeria prior to 1962, the book also looks closely at the tensions between communism and nationalism as the struggle for independence developed over the course of the twentieth century. Inclusive of both urban and rural populations, and flexible with respect to religious and nationalist beliefs and ideals, the PCA opened up “political space” in ways that other left movements/parties in France and elsewhere were either unwilling or unable to do. Drawing on a range of materials that include archival sources from France and Algeria, as well as the records of the British Consulate, the Comintern, and the South African left, We Are No Longer in France looks at perceptions of Algerian communism within and outside of the French/colonial context. It also makes a contribution to our understanding of the plural nature of the struggle for Algerian independence, a political diversity that was shut down under the one-party state that emerged after 1962.

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Daniella Doron, “Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation” (Indiana UP, 2015)

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 00:00:38 -0000

In Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Indiana UP, 2015), Daniella Doron, Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University, looks at the post-WWII effort to rehabilitate Jewish children and to reconstruct Jewish families in France. She argues that ideas about the family were tied to national identity, citizenship, and ethnicity. Her works adds to the growing scholarship on the history of childhood and the history of the Jewish family.

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Robert Priest, “The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France” (Oxford UP, 2014)

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 13:17:51 -0000

Robert Priest‘s The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a fascinating book about another fascinating book: Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jesus, published in 1863. Renan’s was a nineteenth-century non-fiction bestseller, but is far from widely read today. In a series of chapters that explore issues of authorship, content, and reception, Priest offers readers a contextual analysis of this “secular” life of Jesus within Renan’s own biography and oeuvre. He also examines the controversy surrounding the book in France, and traces its continuing impact and legacies into the early twentieth century.

One of the major contributions of this work is its analysis of the popular reception of Vie de Jesus by French citizens across the political and religious spectrum. In addition to contemporary press and pamphlet discussion of the text, Priest also consulted hundreds of letters addressed to its author from men and women throughout France. This previously unexamined archival material gives us a glimpse of how “everyday” readers responded to Renan’s work, its spiritual and political meanings. The Gospel According to Renan illuminates the history of reading and writing under the Second Empire. Its in-depth analysis of La Vie de Jesus also reveals a great deal about the intersections of religion and politics in the years leading up to the Third Republic.

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Domna Stanton, “The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing” (Ashgate, 2014)

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 07:35:26 -0000

Domna Stanton‘s latest book The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing (Ashgate, 2014) is a series of six case studies with important literary, historical, and theoretical implications for how we think about gender in the seventeenth century and beyond. In two parts, the first focused on male and the second focused on female writers in this period, the book examines critically key works by Racine, FÃ©nelon, Poulain de la Barre, La Guette, La Fayette and SÃ©vignÃ©. In close readings that situate authors and texts within a broader historical context, Stanton examines gender as a dynamic, relational construct across multiple genres, including drama in its comic and tragic forms, letters, treatise, novella, and memoir. Departing from the premise that the querelle des femmes must also be understood as a querelle des hommes, The Dynamics of Gender is concerned throughout with women and men, femininity and masculinity, writers and the written-about.

Drawing on and engaging with the critical theoretical work and insights of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, The Dynamics of Gender makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how gender and power work and shift in and across texts and time. This is a book about bodies and/of writing that pursues important questions about what it meant to write as men and women historically, and about what “reading-as-a-feminist” might mean into the present and future.

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Sarah Maza, “Violette Noziere: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris” (U. of California Press, 2012)

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 16:22:58 -0000

On August 21, 1933, the teenaged Violette Noziere attempted to kill both her parents.

At first, seemingly so clearcut, the case ultimately came to be characterized by a “troubling ambiguity” that unsettled Paris for years.

Were the Nozieresan upstanding middle-class family? Was Violette a victim of sexual assault, her father a heinous predator? Was Violette a sexual degenerate? In an age of unprecedented social mobility, had the family tragically overstepped, with the parents granting a wild daughter too much freedom? No one knew.

It was the perfect cautionary tale of the time- giving voice to concerns of contemporary France’s, fears of changing attitudes towards gender, class, industry, economics, art, everything. In Violette Noziere: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris, Sarah Maza weaves together social history with an astute analysis of the times to paint a vivid portrait of Noziere’s society, her circumstances and her crime.

It’s a gripping tale that provides an intimate glimpse into a period that is often overshadowed: Paris of the 1930s, transfixed by a story of parricide and incest, tensed for the war that is about to come.

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Maud S. Mandel, “Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict” (Princeton University Press, 2014)

Fri, 11 Dec 2015 13:18:19 -0000

In Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014), Maud S. Mandel, Dean of the College at Brown University, challenges the view that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Instead, Mandel argues that the Muslim-Jewish conflict in France has been shaped by local, national, and international forces, including the decolonization of French North Africa. Looking at key moments, from Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, to the 1968 student riots, to France’s experiments with multiculturalism in the 1980s, Mandel poses a challenge to the reductionist narrative of Muslim-Jewish polarization.

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Yarimar Bonilla, “Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 15:03:40 -0000

As overseas departments of France, the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are frequently described as anomalies within the postcolonial Caribbean. Yet in reality, as Yarimar Bonilla argues in her new book Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (University of Chicago Press, 2015), the majority of Caribbean states are in fact non-sovereign. Moreover, even for those nations that are nominally independent, their sovereignty is nonetheless continually compromised by the foreign influence that comes with globalization. Thus, the Caribbean as a whole is a region where non-sovereignty is the dominant political status, requiring alternative political frameworks that move beyond identifying sovereignty as the inevitable and necessary result of decolonization. Bonilla calls this process of imagining and testing out these new frameworks “non-sovereign politics.” Non-Sovereign Futures examines the emergence of non-sovereign politics through an ethnography of labor activists in Guadeloupe. Whereas union activists had explicitly nationalist agendas in the 1950s and 1960s, by the early 2000s, sovereignty was no longer the terrain on which activists made claims upon the state. Bonilla provides a compelling analysis of the ways that Guadeloupean labor activists disrupted island life through a series of labor and general strikes, engaged and shaped the historical legacies of slavery and emancipation, and transformed their own personal political selves. Though these activists frequently expressed disappointment with the results of these strikes, Bonilla insists that their true accomplishment was in imagining new possibilities for making claims upon the French state that were no longer bound to the unsatisfying question of sovereignty.

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Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria” (U of Chicago, 2014)

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 13:02:19 -0000

In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago, 2014), Sarah Abrevaya Stein, professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA, takes a new perspective to the history of Algerian Jews, looking at the Saharan Jews to south of the larger, coastal communities. Saharan Jews received different treatment from French authorities, asking us to rethink the story we tell about colonialism and decolonization and Jewish history.

Stein draws on materials from thirty archives across six countries to shed light on this small, but revealing, community that has not received its due attention until now.

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Jerome Bourdon, “Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle” (Presses des Mines, 2014)

Tue, 17 Nov 2015 16:02:16 -0000

Jerome de Bourdon‘s Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle (Presses des Mines, 2014) is a revised version of a book that first appeared in 1990. This edition has been revamped, and includes a new introduction in which Bourdon explores the historiography of the medium in the years since the book’s original publication. A history of television that is also a history of the De Gaulle presidency and the early years of the Fifth Republic, Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle examines a range of issues, from government legislation to programming and content, to the variety of personnel (directors, producers, technicians, administrators) who made television happen during this “era of professionalization.” Exploring the medium as both information and entertainment, the book considers the relationship between television and the cinema, situating television within the broader cultural and political history of France during this critical period. Covering key events and turning points, including the introduction of a second channel in 1964 and a key directors’ strike in 1965, the book also charts the years leading up to 1968 in France, exploring the impact that TV and les eventements had upon one another.

This new edition considers the history of TV in light of the technological and cultural developments of the last twenty-five years (reality TV, the Internet) and the new (especially audiovisual) archival material available to researchers of television’s past in France. Bringing together the analysis of government policy, culture, and labour, the book is vital reading for anyone interested in the history of the French media and/or the Fifth Republic’s crucial first decade.

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Am Johal, “Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene” (Atropos Press, 2015)

Sun, 08 Nov 2015 19:02:06 -0000

The French philosopher Alain Badiou is not best known for his engagement with ecological matters per se. Badiou’s insights regarding being, truth, and political militancy are, however, highly relevant for the consideration of “the ecological question.” Based on a doctoral thesis written under Badiou’s supervision, Am Johal‘s new book, Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene(Atropos Press, 2015) is a thinking through and with Badiou’s work while addressing some of the most pressing concerns of our time: the relationship between human beings, technology, and nature; the meaning of change; and the possibilities of democratic politics and resistance. This, during an era that many now refer to as the “Anthropocene,” a period in which the impact of human beings on geological conditions and change has become unmistakable.

Ecological Metapolitics is a work of engaged philosophy that will illuminate readers’ understanding of Badiou’s oeuvre. The book also makes an important contribution to our understanding of the past, present, and future of a modernity troubled on scales local and global. In dialogue with one of the most significant French thinkers of the postwar period, the book engages in ideas and debates that reach well beyond the boundaries of national spaces, cultures, and politics.

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Anita Guerrini, “The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Wed, 04 Nov 2015 10:54:53 -0000

Anita Guerrini‘s wonderful new book explores Paris as a site of anatomy, dissection, and science during the reign of Louis XIV between 1643-1715. The journey begins with readers accompanying a dead body to sites of dissection across the city, after which we are introduced to four anatomists – charter members of the Paris Academy of Sciences – who will act as focal points for the rest of the story.The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris (University of Chicago Press, 2015) opens up Parisian bodies – human and animal, dead and alive – to argue that dissection played a major role in the development of experimental methods in seventeenth century science. In Guerrini’s hands, the history of science and medicine in early modern Paris was simultaneously a history of fairy tales and opera, dogs and chameleons, artists and knife-makers, labyrinth-making and oratory. It is a fascinating book that is a must-read for historians of anatomy and of early modern science and medicine, and will be accessible and gripping for readers well beyond those fields.

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Malick Ghachem’s “The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution” (Cambridge UP, 2012)

Tue, 27 Oct 2015 12:57:05 -0000

Malick Ghachem‘s recent book The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012) takes a long look at Haiti’s colonial history on the legal questions around slavery. In particular, he traces the implementation of the Code Noir, France’s earliest attempt to impose a legal structure on its American colonies’ plantation system. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Code ostensibly regulated how masters and slaves related to one another. Provisions in the Code sought to keep a strong colonial economy going, which meant limiting how much control an owner had over enslaved people. This produced areas of tension between imperial officials wanting to rein in abuse, and planters desire for total control over their laborers. At the same time, it created a legal consciousness for enslaved people who would eventually use the terms of the Code Noir in their insurgency turned revolution. Ghachem’s account adds rich complexity to our understanding of why the Haitian Revolution occurred. Rather than see it as a novel burst of enslaved action, Ghachem shows how the Revolution was part of a much longer tradition, anchored in the laws of slavery.

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Jonathyne Briggs, “Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980” (Oxford UP, 2015)

Wed, 30 Sep 2015 14:48:37 -0000

“Pop pop pop pop musik” -M

Jonathyne Briggs‘ new book, Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980(Oxford University Press, 2015) makes music the historical focus of the Fifth Republic’s first two decades. What made certain sounds “French,” and how did different cultural communities come together, expressing themselves in a variety of musical forms? From Francoise Hardy to Serge Gainsbourg, to the sounds of free jazz, Brittany folk, and punk, the book considers French musical production and consumption in global cultural context. Exploring the relationship between audio and national identities and communities, Briggs tracks both the influences from outside France on a range of scenes in and beyond Paris, and the reach of “French” sounds beyond the nation’s borders.

Sounds French is a book that examines the contributions of artists and listeners, reading “the noise” of (and surrounding) the music treated in its pages. The book also includes links to some of the songs that Briggs writes about (see the companion website developed by OUP). Fans of yÃ©-yÃ©, Johnny Hallyday, chanson, Jean-Michel Jarre, Alain Stivell, Metal Urbain, and/or Daft Punk will all find much to learn and enjoy here.

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Kimberly Arkin, “Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France” (Stanford UP, 2013)

Thu, 24 Sep 2015 17:57:25 -0000

In Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoulson, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies and the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut, argues that the promise and peril of conversion was projected onto the figure of the Jew, the ultimate religious “other” in English society. Shoulson looks at English writings on religious conversion and how conversion became a means through which other “technologies of transformation” were figured. His reading of diverse texts, from the translated King James Bible to the poetry of Milton, helps us understand the ways in which the figure of the Jew could serve a variety of purposes in the early modern English imagination.

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Richard C. Keller, “Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Wed, 23 Sep 2015 12:46:02 -0000

In August 2003, a heat wave in France killed close to 15,000 people, the majority of whom were over 75. Prominent among the dead were a group of victims known as “the forgotten,” people who died alone and whose bodies were never claimed. Known as the “forgotten,” their stories are at the heart of Richard C. Keller‘s fascinating new book Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Official narratives of the disaster focused narrowly on the problem of the elderly who died alone, seemingly because their families were too busy vacationing to check in or claim their relatives. Yet, as Keller shows, these official narratives were incomplete and often incorrect. Moreover, by focusing so intently on elderly victims, these narratives have shaped subsequent public health initiatives, which have collectively identified the elderly as the most vulnerable population in the event of heat, all the while ignoring other similarly vulnerable groups.

Fatal Isolation pushes past official narratives to provide the first historical treatment of the disaster. By drawing on disaster studies, social theory, ethnography, demography, and sociology, Keller weaves together the August vacation, housing policy, architecture, and debates over the place of the aging in French society. In the process, Fatal Isolation uncovers a much longer, much richer, and much more complex history of the disaster and French society’s own contributions to it.

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Dana Simmons, “Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Tue, 15 Sep 2015 17:40:05 -0000

Dana Simmons‘s marvelous and thoughtful new book takes on a question that many of us likely take for granted: “What is a need; what is a want, a desire, a luxury?” Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2015) offers an answer that emerges from and is embedded in the particular historical context of nineteenth century France, but has consequences that range well beyond modern French history. Early in this fascinating study, Simmons articulates an argument that threads through the book: “a science of human needs undergirded the modern wage economy and the welfare state.” That science was collaboratively built by a diverse community of agronomists, chemists, doctors, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, amateur data gatherers, trade unions, and others who collectively attempted to define and then measure human needs for the sake of better social organization. How to do this was not at all self-evident, and fierce debates were waged that challenged participants to rethink the most basic elements of a notion of society: What were the “needs” that must be fulfilled in order to keep persons productive? Were those needs physical and/or psychological? What were the characteristics of a model “person,” anyway? The chapters of the book narrate the traces that these debates left on the bodies of workers, the pages of history, and the basic notions (like “minimum wage,” like “citizen”) that make up modern conceptions of civil society. Highly recommended!

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Tabetha Ewing, “Rumor, Diplomacy, and War in Enlightenment Paris” (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014)

Mon, 31 Aug 2015 17:58:55 -0000

Tabetha Ewing‘s Rumor, Diplomacy and War in Enlightenment Paris (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014) is all about the on dit, the word on the street that everyday Parisians might have picked up, and/or spread around town in the 1740s. Focused on rumor during the War of Austrian Succession that lasted from 1740-1748, Ewing’s is a book that examines a range of urban voices and opinions across a pivotal decade of the Enlightenment.

Taking very seriously the landscapes of gossip and fantasy, Rumor, Diplomacy, and War is intriguing in its subject matter and its methodology. Interested in the circulation of speech and ideas, Ewing tracks a variety of bruits–open and clandestine media, royal efforts to release and police information about matters of state and military conflict, and oral and written forms of communication. All this, with the aim of exploring a distinctively early-modern brand of political participation, and an “inchoate citizenship” that existed in the decades before the French Revolution. Questions of national identity, loyalty to the regime (or not), and political expression/representation were in the air during these years of war and Enlightenment. Ewing’s is a book that shows us how much historians can hear if we listen carefully.

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Lisa Moses Leff, “The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2015)

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 11:54:00 -0000

Lisa Moses Leff joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss her new book, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015). In the aftermath of the Holocaust, wracked by grief and determined to facilitate the writing of an objective...

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Eric Reed, “Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Fri, 17 Jul 2015 18:22:44 -0000

The Tour de France is happening right now! The 2015 edition started on July 4th and will continue until July 26th. I’m excited to be able to share this interview with Eric Reed about his new book, Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as riders make their way through the various stages of this, the most famous bike race in the world.

A compelling historical narrative of the Tour, including some of its most significant moments and stars, Selling the Yellow Jersey explores the Tour as a global phenomenon. Reed argues that, over the course of the twentieth century, France was a full participant in a globalization that the Tour exemplified as a business and media enterprise, and a spectacle consumed by millions of fans around the world. Considering the roles of organizers, riders, and spectators within and outside of France, the book examines the meanings of “Frenchness” in contexts regional, national, and global. From the Tour’s emergence in 1903 during a “cycling craze” that had a particular vitality in France, to the doping scandals of more recent years, Selling the Yellow Jersey traces the Tour’s triumphs and scandals over more than a hundred years. It is a history of culture and commerce, from an organizational home base in Paris, to smaller French host cities such as Pau and Brest, to an international scene of participants both on, and beyond, the saddle.

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Gary Wilder, “Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World” (Duke UP, 2015)

Sun, 28 Jun 2015 11:56:52 -0000

Gary Wilder‘s new book, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) builds upon the work he began in The French Imperial Nation State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Freedom Time considers the politics and poetics of Aimee Casaire and Leopold Senghor during the period 1945-1960, “thinking with” and “working through” the ways these figures anticipated a post-imperial world. The book explores notions of liberation and temporality, considering the alternatives to nationalism and the nation-state that these thinkers imagined as they looked forward to a more democratic, autonomous future on the other side of colonialism.

While The French Imperial Nation State asked readers to “rethink France,” the project here is, in the author’s own words, to “unthink France”. Indeed, France, decolonization, and even liberation itself, are all interrogated in this work, as they were by the authors who are at the center of the project. Freedom Time is a book that takes seriously the futures envisioned by Casaire and Senghor, situating their projects historically and intellectually within contexts French and global, and considering the implications of their thought for a contemporary world still troubled by profound inequalities. It is an important book for those interested in the most urgent political questions, and in the problems and promises of freedoms past, present, and future.

At the beginning of our interview, Gary mentions a video link I sent him before we spoke. It is a video of Lauryn Hill performing “Freedom Time,” a wonderful song that I was reminded of by this wonderful book.

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Felicia McCarren, “French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop” (Oxford UP, 2013)

Wed, 10 Jun 2015 15:15:30 -0000

Felicia McCarren‘s latest book, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop (Oxford University Press, 2013) explores the fascinating evolution of this urban dance form in the French context. Following the choreography and performances of key figures from the hip hop world in France, McCarren’s is a history that pays close attention to dancers and their moves, and especially to the ways in which contemporary dance is informed by-and responsive to-social and political concerns and change.

Tracing the history of le hip hop as a form that arrived in France from the United States in the 1980s, French Moves examines the ways this cultural import came to “speak French”. Dance has occupied a privileged place in French national culture historically.French hip hop benefited from the outset from the support of a Socialist government interested in encouraging this meeting of street and stage in performances that embody youth, cultural diversity, and a mouvement social on a number of levels. Considering politics, poetics, techniques and technologies, the book has exciting and important implications for how we think about bodies and borders. It will be of great interest to anyone thinking through issues of citizenship and difference, from the end of the twentieth century up through the complexities of identity and nation in present-day France.

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David Meren, “With Friends Like These: Entangled Nationalisms in the Canada-Quebec-France Triangle, 1944-1970” (University of British Columbia Press, 2014)

Tue, 05 May 2015 13:22:42 -0000

In 1967, French President Charles de Gaulle cried out “Vive le Quebec libre!” from the balcony of Montreal’s City Hall. The controversial moment became a myth almost instantly. The four words De Gaulle uttered remain emblematic of an extremely important moment in the histories of Quebec and Canada. Illustrative of the General’s penchant for political provocation and spectacle, they also hold a special place in his dramatic biography.

David Meren‘s With Friends Like These: Entangled Nationalisms in the Canada-Quebec-France Triangle, 1944-1970(University of British Columbia Press, 2012), is anchored by President de Gaulle’s famous cri du balcon. Situating the incident within the broader context of a complex “triangle” of relations between Canada, Quebec, and France, the book deepens our understanding of what De Gaulle said and the meanings his exclamation have carried since. At the same time, the book develops a much broader and richer historical picture of the relationship between these three societies, and their nationalisms, from the end of the Second World War to the end of the 1960s.

With Friends Like These is an exciting example of an international history that interweaves the analysis of diplomacy, economic interests, and societal and cultural change over two and half decades. In our conversation, David and I discussed his methodology and the challenges of thinking together these three national communities within a rapidly shifting global context during the period. We also had a chance to talk about some of the legacies of the history of the Canada-Quebec-France triangle for contemporary political and cultural identities and exchanges.

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Hugo Frey, “Nationalism and the Cinema in France” (Berghahn Books, 2014)

Fri, 24 Apr 2015 13:41:42 -0000

Hugo Frey‘s new book, Nationalism and the Cinema in France: Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945-1995 (Berghahn Books, 2014) distinguishes between a national cinema (films made in France) and a nationalist cinema motivated by the specific agenda to promote une certaine idee de la France. Working with ideas about “political mythology” and the “film event,” Frey analyses a series of films and filmmakers, including: Michel Audiard, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Lelouch, Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Pagnol, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, and Francois Truffaut.

Contributing to a vast and complex field of work on the cinema in France since 1945, Nationalism and the Cinema in France offers readers an analysis of French “metafilms” (films about film and filmmaking) in the postwar period; the representation of French history and modernity; the conversation between French cinema and Hollywood (and France and the United States more generally); the complex relationship between French film, nationalism, and empire; antisemitism; and the politics of the extreme Right up to the mid-1990s.

In our conversation, Hugo and I consider the legacies of the fifty year period covered in the book, including the links between the issues discussed in its pages and more contemporary struggles over national identity and difference.

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Tracy Leavelle, “The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America” (U Penn Press, 2014)

Mon, 09 Mar 2015 12:40:00 -0000

Studies of Christian missions can easily fall into two different traps: either one-sidedly presenting the missionaries as heroes saving benighted savages or portraying them as villains carrying out cultural imperialism. At the same time, these vastly different perspectives are based on the same error of minimizing native agency. In The...

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Nicolas Kenny, “The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation” (U of Toronto Press, 2014)

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 18:13:26 -0000

Nicolas Kenny‘s new book, The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation (University of Toronto Press, 2014) explores the sensory histories and urban development of Montreal and Brussels from the 1880s to 1914. We’ve read about Paris, London, New York, and Berlin, but what of the middle-sized cities in Europe and North America where so many turn-of-the-century dwellers saw, smelled, heard, touched, and tasted their way through urban life? What did it feel like to live in Montreal and Brussels, to walk their streets, to work in their sites of industry and production, to seek refuge in their domestic spaces?

A model of transnational scholarship, The Feel of the City moves from discussion of panoramic and labyrinthine images of the city, to the analysis of sources revealing the ways inhabitants across the social landscape experienced work, home, and the street. In our conversation, Nicolas and I talk about how contemporaries and scholars grapple with this contested term. We also take on ideas about the body and affect, gender and class, the impact of linguistic difference in representations of urban life, and even a recent controversy regarding noise and flight paths over Brussels today. Have a listen…

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Carol E. Harrison, “Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith” (Cornell UP, 2014)

Fri, 23 Jan 2015 12:39:47 -0000

Since the political left and right first arose during the French Revolution, Catholics have been categorized as either conservatives or liberals, and most Catholics of the French nineteenth century are assumed to have been conservatives. In Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith (Cornell University Press, 2014), Carol E. Harrison goes beyond this familiar dichotomy to unveil a tradition of lay Catholicism that refused to go to either side, remaining in the political middle and marrying traditional Catholicism with a progressive social consciousness. Many of these people were the companions and heirs of the all-too-ill-known FÃ©licitÃ© de Lamennais, whose condemnation by the pope in the 1830s did not prevent his social and religious vision from continuing to flourish throughout the century.

I spoke with Harrison to hear her perspective on her Catholics, who range from the celebrated daughter of Victor Hugo LÃ©opoldine, to a totally forgotten best-selling novelist, Pauline Craven, to the Empress Eugenia de Montijo herself. Nor were male Catholics missing from the story: we talked about the well-known historian FrÃ©dÃ©ric Ozanam, the melancholy poet Maurice de GuÃ©rin, and the Dominican star Henri Lacordaire. I heard all about their ‘romantic impulse toward a renewal of faith’.”

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Michael Kwass, “Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground” (Harvard University Press, 2014)

Mon, 19 Jan 2015 12:41:15 -0000

Michael Kwass‘s new book, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground is much more than an exciting biography of the notorious eighteenth-century smuggler whose name remains legendary in contemporary France. Focusing on the rise and fall of a mythic, early-modern French bandit, Kwass’s study moves between the micro- and the macro-historical, revealing the crucial role that smuggling played in a French economic and political landscape that must be understood in global perspective. The book shows how the underground economy that emerged during the ancien regime developed in close relationship to the trade practices and regulation attempts of the French state. The opposite was also true. State efforts to regulate trade in tobacco and calico from the reign of Louis XIV onwards contributed to the development of illicit activity and networks, and the desire to quash the economic underground, in turn, provoked changes in economic policy, legislation, and perceptions of the need for reform in the years leading up to the French Revolution.

Revisiting the history of the “consumer revolution” of the eighteenth century, Contraband draws our attention to the violence and struggle that accompanied the proliferation of goods and markets associated with “modernity.” In our interview, Michael underlines his aim to write a history inspired by, and in conversation with, more recent events and debates about “the dark side of globalization”. This makes the book a must-read for anyone interested in the longer-term history of the forms of contraband, regulation, and resistance that shape the economic, political, and cultural networks (both legal and illicit) of the present on a global scale.

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Stephen L. Harp, “Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France” (LSU Press, 2014)

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 16:43:28 -0000

In the decades after the Second World War, France became the foremost nudist site in Europe. Stephen L. Harp‘s new book, Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France (Louisiana State University Press, 2014) explains how this came to be. A study of nudist ideas, activity, and sites from the interwar years to the mid-1970s, the book is a fascinating history of the people (the Durville brothers, Kienne de Mongeot, and Albert Lecocq) and places (the Ile du Levant, Montalivet, and Cap d’Agde) that made nude tourism and leisure a major phenomenon in France.

Building on previous scholarship that has explored nudism in different national contexts, Au Naturel is a transnational history that illuminates the movement of bodies, beliefs, and practices across political borders, and the emergence of a postwar European community from a unique perspective. Drawing on a rich archive of materials from the local to the international, Harp reveals that nudism was both cultural and political in its meanings and effects in and beyond France. A history of the body and sexuality, Au Naturel is a story of shifting landscapes and values that will be of tremendous interest to readers across multiple fields.

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Ernest P. Young, “Ecclesiastical Colony: China’s Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate” (Oxford UP, 2013)

Mon, 08 Dec 2014 13:01:10 -0000

In theory, Christian missionaries plan only on working in a country until an indigenous leadership can take over management of the church. Theory is one thing, but practice is quite another, as Dr. Ernest P. Young shows in his fascinating exploration of this issue in his Ecclesiastical Colony: China’s Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate (Oxford University Press, 2013). In this well-researched work, Dr. Young shows why many Catholics missionaries, including those who were not French, were willing to look to French protection in China, and how that impeded the growth of an indigenous, acculturated church. Dr. Young also tells the fascinating story of how a few missionaries, sympathetic to Chinese aspirations and wishing to build a truly Chinese Catholic Church, worked with the Vatican in an attempt to undermine the French Protectorate. As readers of this fine book will find, the merely partial success of this project has echoes that still reverberate in China today.

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Cathy L. Schneider, “Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

Mon, 08 Dec 2014 11:42:29 -0000

Cathy L. Schneider is the author of Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is associate professor in the School of International Service at American University.

Timeliness is not something that every scholarly book can claim, but Cathy Schneider has published a book of the moment. With protests occurring across the country in response to recent police-related deaths (Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and Eric Garner in New York City), Schneider explains why some of these protests have resulted in rioting in the past and others in peaceful protest. Why, she ponders, has Paris burned while New York City has not had significant rioting in decades, despite similar sociopolitical conditions? New York, Schneider argues, has effective social movement organizations in place to channel frustration surrounding past police violence toward organized protest. For anyone trying to make sense of what recent events, this book is a must read.

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John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014)

Thu, 30 Oct 2014 17:32:32 -0000

After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret modern European intellectual history as a prolonged struggle between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment is generally valorized as identical with rationality, mechanism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, progress, optimism, and secularism, while Romanticism is often connected to holism, irrationality, conservatism, nationalism, myth, pessimism and, eventually, fascism.

John Tresch (University of Pennsylvania) questions these dichotomies in his new book The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In our interview we discuss what made steam engines Romantic, which technical illusions awaited early nineteenth-century Parisian theatergoers and how Saint-Simonians could envisage future society as a Romantic machine.

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Kathrin Yacavone, “Benjamin, Barthes, and the Singularity of Photography” (Bloomsbury, 2013)

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 12:46:17 -0000

Kathrin Yacavone‘s Benjamin, Barthes, and the Singularity of Photography (Bloomsbury, 2013) is an engaging study that explores connections between two of the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century: Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Considering Benjamin’s influence on Barthes’ later work on photography, the book also opens up the possibility of thinking of Barthes’ influence on how we think about and understand Benjamin in terms of the medium’s effects and significance in theoretical terms.

Divided into two parts, the book situates Benjamin and Barthes in their respective historical and political contexts while pursuing a series of themes through their work on photography: self and other, autobiography, memory, and redemption. It also looks closely at each author’s readings of particular photographs, and even establishes links between these. An intriguing postscript explores the continuing relevance of the ideas of these thinkers into the age of digitization. Listeners will find much in our conversation that illuminates the history and theory of photography, as well as the ideas and oeuvres of both Benjamin and Barthes more broadly.

In our interview, Kathrin and I speak about the book and also about her recent work editing a Summer 2014 issue of Nottingham French Studies on “Photography in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures”. Outlining the themes of the articles included in this recent collection, Kathrin offers some thoughts on the continuing vitality of the medium in present-day France.

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Daniel Lee, “Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942” (Oxford UP, 2014)

Tue, 07 Oct 2014 14:29:50 -0000

Daniel Lee‘s new book, Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942 (Oxford University Press, 2014) is highly compelling in its breadth, depth of research, and analysis. Focused on the social relationship between French Jews and the state during this critical period of French history, the book emphasizes the notion of a “Plural Vichy,” a regime that was complex rather than homogenous in its ideology and aims, including its antisemitism. Finding evidence of cooperation and accommodation between French Jewish young people and organizations and the state, the author shows the ways in which Vichy was uneven in its policies and practices, particularly in the two years immediately following the defeat of 1940.

Drawing on a wealth of local and national archival sources, Petain’s Jewish Children examines Vichy’s inclusion of Jewish youth in the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, as well as responses of a range of Jewish youth organizations (including the Jewish Scouts) to Vichy’s ideals and plans. As the book shows, these groups saw in certain Vichy policies and programs for French regeneration (especially the notions of a national cultural revolution and a return to the land) opportunities for the improvement of self, community, and nation. The author also draws on a series of fascinating interviews he conducted with a number of French Jews who lived through this difficult period. Complicating our understanding of years that have been understood predominantly in terms of persecution, resistance, and rescue, Petain’s Jewish Children will be of great interest to scholars of both French and Jewish studies.

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Rebecca Rogers, “A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story” (Stanford UP, 2013)

Thu, 02 Oct 2014 10:31:40 -0000

In the early 1830s, the French school teacher EugÃ©nie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around educational practices there, insisting that not only were women entitled to quality education, but that women’s education served a fundamental role in the French mission in the colonies. “Woman is the most powerful of all influences in Africa as in Europe,” she wrote in 1846, the year after she founded a school for the instruction of indigenous Muslim girls.

In A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria, Rebecca Rogers (Stanford University Press, 2013), a Professor at the UniversitÃ© Paris Descartes and an expert in the history of the French educational system, lucidly explores Luce’s work in the field, bringing a wealth of precise details– everything from what the lessons in the school room were like to prize-giving ceremonies and hygiene inspections. But Rogers also lets the reader in on the questions that remain about Luce’s own life.

Rogers notes that while “EugÃ©nie Allix’s efforts to establish and finance her school have left ample traces in the colonial archives,” there are many details of her life that are not present and which can only be lightly sketched. For example, “[C]ivil registers offer tenuous insight into EugÃ©nie’s social network during her first decade of life in Algeria”… The circumstances of her second marriage “have left no trace in the archival record”… It’s an interesting meditation on the limitations of archives– how the story that is told of the life after is dependent upon the letters and signatures and red tape that the people of history have left behind them, as well as the moves the biographer must make to fill those gaps.

So often the stories of women in history become the stories of all the men they knew and yet, in this case, the archive itself prevents that. As Rogers writes, the men in her life “[b]oth shaped her life in ways the biographer can only imagine” and yet the biographer is left to imagine precisely because the proof is not there. “She appears in the colonial archives as very much an independent woman,” which represents a rather refreshing reversal, almost as unique today as it would’ve been in the 19th century: a woman whose story stands solely on her work.

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John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Fri, 05 Sep 2014 13:25:42 -0000

John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid nineteenth century. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012) narrates the emergence of a new image of the machine, a new concept of nature, a new theory of knowledge, and a new political orientation through a series of chapters that each use the work of a single figure to open up a world of romantic machines.

Part 1 of the book looks at the work of physical scientists whose model of precision experiment and math was transformed by an encounter with romantic philosophy and aesthetics, and introduces the electro-magnetic work of physicist AndreMarie Ampre, the instrumental practices of Prussian geophysical researcher Alexander von Humboldt, and the labor theory of knowledge in relation to the instruments of astronomer and politician Francois Arago. Part 2 looks at the impact of technology on theories of the self and the human, focusing on the fantastic arts and public spectacles featuring new discoveries in optics, mechanics, and natural history. (Readers will find lively discussions of dioramas, hallucinatory opera, symphonies, museums, magic shows, and expositions, here.) Part 3 treats the utopian thinkers and engineer-scientists of the late Restoration and the July Monarchy, looking at religiously-inflected social technologies of conversion, communication, and temporal coordination in the work and thought of Saint-Simon and his followers, printer and literary critic Pierre Leroux’s work and theories, and Auguste Comte’s instruments of thought and paper. It is a rich, elegantly argued work that offers not just a history of science and technology, but also a tracing of the roots of some contemporary continental philosophy, as well.

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John Protevi, “Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)

Fri, 22 Aug 2014 17:41:37 -0000

Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up new ways to conceptualize and ask questions of our objects of study. John Protevi‘s new book offers a wonderfully stimulating conceptual toolbox for doing just that. Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) creates (and guides readers through) a dialogue between the work of Gilles Deleuze and some key works and concepts animating contemporary geophilosophy, cognitive science, and biology. In doing so, Protevi’s work also has the potential to inform work in STS by turning our attention to new possibilities of thinking with scale, and with a process-oriented philosophy (among many other things). A first introduction lays out some of the basic conceptual tools and orientations emerging from Deleuze’s work, and a second introduction uses some of these ideas to explore the work of Francisco Varela in terms of a political physiology of “bodies politic.” After this pair of introductions, the following chapters focus on particular case studies, ranging from ancient and modern warfare, to hydropolitics, to the notion of a “socially mediated neuroplasticity” in cognitive science, to the role of affect in understanding the Occupy Wall Street movement, to the “eco-devo-evo” of Mary Jane West-Eberhard, and much, much else. It’s a fascinating study that has much to offer for the reader who is interested in the creative and analytic possibilities of bringing continental philosophy to bear in science studies.

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Melanie C. Hawthorne, "Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious Life of Gisele d'Estoc" (U Nebraska Press, 2014)

Mon, 11 Aug 2014 08:00:00 -0000

"Why write the biography of a nobody?" That is the question with which Melanie C. Hawthorne begins Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious Life of Gisele d'Estoc (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) but in justifying the writing of such a life and then, in turn, excavating its contours, Hawthorne winds up exploring a number of issues fundamental to the genre of biography. In particular, the biographer's inability fill all gaps, the frequent encounters with dead ends and his/her reliance, at times almost wholly, upon sheer luck. Also, the legacies of the biographers who have gone before us. In d'Estoc's case, as Hawthorne writes, "It is almost as though these experts avoided finding proof of d'Estoc's existence and one has to ask why."

One of the significant contributions of Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist is its transparency- Hawthorne's willingness to include in her text the details of research, alongside serious critical engagement with the notion of what it means to be a researcher in the humanities and why humanities research matters. This flows seamlessly throughout her exploration of d'Estoc's life as she explores the fluidity of life stories, the need to continually rearrange and reevaluate them, "to keep creating unexpected bends on the old narrative paths in order to wake us up to seeing them in a new light." To illustrate this, she uses the story of a 19th century French writer/artist/anarchist, a woman who once pretended to be someone else and whose false identity ultimately historically hijacked the original. It's a story steeped in its times and yet one which also appears surprisingly modern here, and one which- as it is written- highlights fundamental truths about the genre.

One of my favorites is this: "Stories teach us not to take things for granted, and the final lesson of biography is that despite the fact that specific stories always begin and end somewhere, in real life there are no such definitive markers." The story Hawthorne presents of d'Estoc is deliberately left messy, which is- in the end- perhaps its greatest strength.

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Alice Conklin, “In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950” (Cornell UP, 2013)

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 12:06:26 -0000

Host Jonathan Judaken and author Alice Conklin discuss the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French imperialism and European fascism, as well as this neglected chapter in the international history of the human sciences. In Memphis, and in America generally, we remain haunted by the history of “race” as a concept, and racism as a set of social practices. To gain some perspective on our local history, it is useful to take a step back, both in time and place. Alice Conklin‘s newest book, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (Cornell University Press, 2013), tells the story of how the discipline of anthropology and Paris’ ethnographic museum par excellence, the Museum of Man, are wound into the history of racial science and colonial conquest, but also ultimately played an important part in undoing scientific racism. The book offers new insight into the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French imperialism and European fascism, as well as recovers a neglected chapter in the international history of the human sciences. Alice Conklin is a professor in the Department of History at Ohio State University. Her first book, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, 1997) examined the ways in which France’s liberal Third Republic produced a consensus on the legitimacy of imperialism through the notion of a special “mission to civilize” – highlighting the racist and republican elements that together influenced French policy-making. The book won the 1998 Book Prize of the Berskshire Conference of Women’s Historians.

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Noah Shusterman, “The French Revolution: Faith, Desire, and Politics” (Routledge, 2013)

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 13:33:44 -0000

This year marks the 225th anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution. You don’t have to be a historian to know and appreciate how significant that revolution is to our understanding of French society and culture since the eighteenth century. Noah Shusterman‘s new book, The French Revolution: Faith, Desire, and Politics (Routledge, 2013) is an accessible book that provides readers with an overview of the major events and historical actors who shaped the Revolution from the storming of the Bastille on July 14th, 1789 to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799. It is a book that offers a compelling narrative and draws on the vast field of scholarship that has analyzed and interpreted these events for over two centuries.

This new study of the French Revolution emphasizes the central roles that religion and gender played as events unfolded, from the “liberal revolution” of 1789 through the emergence of the republic, from the Terror to Napoleon’s ascent. Readers familiar with the history of the French Revolution will especially appreciate chapters that pay close attention to the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the revolt in the Vendee, issues and events that do not often get the play they may deserve in other surveys. Those who have always wanted to learn about the Revolution will find this book a highly informative and fascinating introduction to historical events and actors that help us understand so much that followed, in France and well beyond its borders. In our interview, Noah and I talk about teaching , the plethora of historical and political interpretations of the French Revolution, and the continuing relevance of that history to a contemporary French republic still struggling with issues of faith, desire, and politics.

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Mary Terrall, “Catching Nature in the Act” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Fri, 04 Jul 2014 11:40:27 -0000

Mary Terrall‘s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the eighteenth-century francophone world. Catching Nature in the Act: Reaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2014) explores this world via the work of Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur and his vast and varied networks of correspondents, assistants, colleagues, and co-naturalists. As we read, we follow this loose network across the bakeries, gardens, tidepools, hedges, studies, academies, kitchens, poultry yards, specimen collections, and other spaces of quotidian life and their associated practices of natural history. As these men and women observed, chased, collected, dissected, preserved, painted, described, and tested, they practiced the production of knowledge about the natural world as a part of their intimate, daily lives. The chapters of Terrall’s book observe them as they in turn observe aphids, mayflies, sea anemones, chickens, and other creatures as a means to understand larger questions about the nature of generation, metamorphosis, reproduction, and other lived behaviors and processes. They feed material from inside the quills of young pigeon feathers to spiders in order to study spider silk and its commercial potential. They glue glass to cocoons to create windows into the metamorphoses of the butterflies inside. They use hog bristles to turn tiny polyps inside-out and observe how they responded. They draw, they incubate, and they incorporate practices and materials from the physical sciences to do so. Catching Nature in the Act contributes thoughtfully to several interrelated historiographical threads in the history of science – the histories of practice and place, the importance of the household as a space of observation and experiment, the role of networks of correspondence and collaboration, the relationship between natural science and theology – and offers helpful revisions of dominant approaches to each of those historiographies of science and its histories. It is a must-read for historians of science, and a fascinating narrative for any interested reader.

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Clare Haru Crowston, “Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France”

Thu, 29 May 2014 13:01:16 -0000

Anyone who’s been paying attention to the flurry around the French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century (Le Capital au XXIe siecle) knows how a la mode the economy is at the moment. Contemporary ideas and debates about capital, debt, and austerity are only part of what makes Clare Crowston‘s Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Duke University Press, 2013) such an interesting read in 2014. In this detailed study of the varied economic, political, social, and cultural meanings and practices of “credit” from the seventeenth through the eighteenth century, Crowston draws our attention to mutually constitutive worlds and systems of circulation. At once a genealogy of credit; an economic, social, and cultural history of fashion; and an examination of the roles of gender and desire in Old Regime France, Credit, Fashion, Sex makes an important contribution to our understanding of the origins of the French Revolution while respecting the historical integrity of the period that came before.

In addition to its conceptual and historiographical insights regarding credit and the complexities of Old Regime society, the book offers readers a fascinating and extensively-researched analysis of the everyday practices and systems of exchange that operated “behind the scenes” of more familiar stories. For example, the book illuminates the mythology and critiques surrounding Marie Antoinette, the queen who embodied like no one else the intersection between ideas about credit, fashion, and sexuality in the era before 1789. At the same time, Crowston gives us a glimpse of other figures and social actors who played vital roles in the society of the period: Rose Bertin, the queen’s dressmaker; the fashion merchants who made so much luxury and refinement possible, as well as all those wives not married to Louis XVI who traded on/in their husbands’ credit, participating in multiple economic and cultural systems of circulation and power.

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Miranda Spieler, “Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana” (Harvard University Press, 2012)

Fri, 28 Mar 2014 10:58:00 -0000

In Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard University Press, 2012), historian Miranda Spieler tells of the transformation of a slave plantation colony into a destination for metropolitan convicts in the eight decades following the French Revolution. Unlike the better-known case of British Australia, French Guiana failed to turn...

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Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeffrey H. Jackson, eds. “The Thinking Space” (Ashgate, 2013)

Thu, 27 Mar 2014 10:23:23 -0000

Believe it or not, the origins of this podcast and the entire New Books Network can be traced to a conversation I had in a cafein Ann Arbor, Michigan (Sweetwaters in Kerrytown, as it happens) in 2004. I was sitting there minding my own business when I overheard Ed Vielmetti and Lou Rosenfeldtalking about something called “del.icio.us” [sic]. It sounded interesting, so I asked them–complete strangers though they were–about it. They kindly brought me up to speed on something else called “Web 2.0.” Then I begin thinking…

Turns out a lot thinking is done in cafes, as Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeffrey H. Jacksonpoint out in their fascinating book The Thinking Space: The Cafe as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy and Vienna (Ashgate, 2013). At one time or another, most modern Western intellectuals found themselves in one or another cafedrinking coffee, dreaming big dreams, and often arguing with another. The caffeine helped, but the atmosphere and company helped even more. Unhurried, quiet, comfortable, warm, public, inexpensive, full of reading material, open long hours, and right on the corner. The coffee house is an ideal “third place” for cerebral types. To my mind the most fascinating thing about this remarkable collection of essays is the variety of kinds of coffee houses found around Europe. Needless to say, they didn’t (and don’t) all look like your local Starbucks. If you like cafes, you should grab a copy of this book and read it . . . in a cafe, of course.

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Ellen J. Amster, “Medicine and the Saints” (University of Texas Press, 2013)

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 09:49:28 -0000

What is the interplay between the physical human body and the body politic? This question is at the heart of Ellen J. Amster‘s Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 (University of Texas Press, 2013). In this pioneering, interdisciplinary study, Professor Amster explores the French campaign to colonize Morocco through medicine. It is through medicine and medical encounters that Amster reveals competing ideas of “scientific paradigm (cosmologies), knowledge systems (hygiene and medical theory), and the technologies of physical intervention (therapeutics)” (p. 2) between the colonizing French positivists and the Moroccan populace.

Amster’s breadth of expertise in the fields of medical history, Moroccan/North African history, the history of French colonization, the study of Islam and Sufism, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy is equally matched to the depth in which she explores these topics throughout the six chapters of her work. Each chapter explores a unique encounter, or more often clash, between the French and the Moroccan. From Sufi saints in the first chapter to government hygiene initiatives in the fourth, Amster is meticulous and exhaustive with her source material. Even more distinctive is her use of oral narratives. Scholars interested in the role of women as medical practitioners will greatly benefit from Amster’s exploration of the qabla (midwife) in the fifth chapter. Gradually, Amster demonstrates that French attempts to “modernize” Morocco were in fact the very seeds that led to Moroccan ideas of independence and nationhood. This work will have a tremendous impact on many fields and hopefully give rise to further interdisciplinary work in the fields of Islam, North African and Moroccan history, and medicine.

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Colette Colligan, “A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris 1890-1960” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014)

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 11:31:29 -0000

From the end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Paris was a center for the publication of numerous English-language books, including many of a sexually explicit, pornographic nature. Colette Colligan‘s new book, A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014) explores the rich and fascinating history of these “Paris editions” across seven decades of literary publishing in France, in English. Troubling too-simplistic notions of British prudishness versus French sexual liberalism and “high” versus “low” literatures, Colligan’s book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Paris’s expatriate past, a past that remains part of the city’s mythology to this day.

The book includes discussion of the cultural, legal, and commercial sides of this story, as well as closer textual analyses of some key examples of “degraded” and high modernist literature. In its chapters, readers will be introduced to characters and works that may not be so well known, including the British expatriate publisher Charles Carrington (whose publishing credits include Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1908). In addition to illuminating the lives of lesser known figures and texts, A Publisher’s Paradise also situates the history of “dirty books” published in the French capital to literary legends Sylvia Beach (the owner of the Parisian landmark English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Co. and publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922) and Vladimir Nabokov (whose novel Lolita was first published by Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press in Paris in 1955). The book will be a rewarding read to anyone interested in the histories of publishing, pornography, and/or Parisian cultural life.

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Camille Robcis, “The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France” (Cornell UP, 2013)

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 15:24:18 -0000

Only in a place like France do the texts and theories of towering intellectual figures like Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan come up in public and political discussions of family policy and law. Camille Robcis‘s new book, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell University Press, 2013) was in part inspired by contemporary French references to structural anthropology and psychoanalysis in contentious debates (within and outside of the National Assembly) about things like same-sex marriage, reproduction, and homosexual adoption. The book is a fascinating political, legal, and intellectual history that takes readers from the Napoleonic Code of 1804 right up to major French societal rifts over the family in recent years.

Examining the work of early “familialists” who argued for the family as essential to “the social”, Robcis goes on to read Levi-Strauss and Lacan in relationship to ideas and policies dealing with the family in broader political and legal context in France. The book also illuminates the roles of key French “bridge-figures” who translated complex structuralist and psychoanalytic ideas about kinship and “the symbolic”, bringing these notions into more widespread political and public discourse. This is a history with important implications for how we understand contemporary struggles over French republicanism, universalism, and what defines the family in terms both theoretical and practical.

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Kathleen Wellman, “Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France” (Yale UP, 2013)

Tue, 21 Jan 2014 13:36:23 -0000

Queens and royal mistresses of the Renaissance were the Hollywood celebrities of their time, which explains their enduring magnetism for writers, artists, and the public. Historians and scholars, however, have long ignored them. Enlightenment philosophers used descriptions of powerful women in the French court to mock the monarchy. Nineteenth-century historians propagated myths about these historical women to discredit the monarchy and to justify the exclusion of women from the French republic. Feminist scholars have eschewed royal women as subjects because their influence stemmed from their sexual and romantic association with kings and not because of their own merit. And contemporary historiography in France has long turned away from political elites to focus on social and cultural sites of inquiry.

Kathleen Wellman, in Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France (Yale University Press, 2013, Yale), argues that women of the French court deserve our undivided attention because they greatly influenced the French Renaissance. Between the mid-15th century to the end of the 16th century, women such as AgnÃ¨s Sorel, Anne of Brittany, Diane de Poitiers, Catherine de Medici, and Marguerite de Valois, acted with agency, carved out spheres of influence, overcame constraints, and made use of their positions for personal and political ends, and in the process influenced the course of French history. Wellman’s engrossing account of royal women compels us to revise our understanding of the French Renaissance.

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Sandrine Sanos, “The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France” (Stanford University Press, 2013)

Sun, 05 Jan 2014 11:45:39 -0000

Sandrine Sanos‘s new book, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford University Press, 2013), examines the central roles that gender, sexuality, and race played in the far-right ideologies of the 1930s. Re-reading the work and ideas of a group of male intellectuals known as the Jeune Droite or “Young New Right,” Sanos argues that aesthetics and politics were deeply intertwined in these authors’ representations of a crisis of French civilization and in the antisemitic, racist, and misogynist responses they articulated. Figures like Maurice Blanchot and Louis-Ferdinand Celine were some of the most famous members of an intellectual movement that elaborated an “aesthetics of hate” in which Jews, women, and homosexuals figured as emblems of decadence and decline. The book also traces in fascinating ways some of the crucial links between French anti-Semitism and imperialism, examining connections between metropolitan and colonial racisms.

While Sanos is careful to point out that hers is not a history of fascism per se, The Aesthetics of Hate makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the far-right in France and beyond. The book illuminates the intersections between gender, sexuality, and race in modern France, as well as the fundamental interdependence of French culture and politics through the twentieth century. An archaeology of some of the more repugnant political ideas of the 1930s, the book also has broader implications for our understanding of contemporary French expressions of cultural anxiety, racism, and hateful politics.

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Jennifer Sessions, “By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria” (Cornell UP, 2011)

Sat, 21 Dec 2013 11:31:17 -0000

Early modern European imperialism is really pretty easy to understand. Spain, Portugal, England, France, Russia and the rest were ruled by people whose business was war. They were conquerors, and conquering was what they did. So, when they attacked and subdued vast stretches of the world, they did so without regret or second-thought.

All that changed after French Revolution. France was not, ostensibly at least, ruled by people whose business was war. Yet, even for the French republicans, imperialism remained attractive. And so the question was put: how does a republican state “do” imperialism?

In her excellent book By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2011), Jennifer Sessions tells us how with reference to the French conquest and colonization of Algeria. The answer the French gave was strikingly simple: you make you imperial subjects into citizens and your imperial territories part of the mother country. That was the theory, at least. Sessions shows us how it worked out–or didn’t work out–in practice. Listen in.

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Daniel Sherman, "French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945-1975" (U Chicago Press, 2011)

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 09:00:00 -0000

The "primitivist idea" has played an important role in art and culture from at least the late nineteenth century. From Paul Gauguin to Pablo Picasso, to the more recent MusÃ©e du Quai Branly (opened in 2006), a variety of individuals and institutions have engaged with so-called "primitive" peoples; collected their artifacts; displayed, represented, and mimicked their cultural forms and practices. Daniel Sherman's French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945-1975 (University of Chicago Press, 2011) examines the postwar history of primitivism as one inflected throughout by the colonial past and present. Offering readers a perspective on the trente glorieuses ("thirty glorious years") following the Second World War, Sherman challenges oversimplified narratives of economic recovery and prosperity, reminding us that the period was one of deep cultural and political cleavages that cannot be understood without reference to the history and legacies of French imperialism.

The book looks at the visual arts, of course, but also makes fascinating links between this domain and others: ethnography, ideas about home dÃ©cor, tourism, and nuclear testing. Tensions between notions of modernity and tradition run throughout the chapters of French Primitivism. Postwar anthropologists, artists, museum curators, and planners considered the primitive in the metropolitan context, developing internal as well as external forms of preservationism and systems of knowledge/representation that drew on long-standing ideas and practices directed at colonial subjects and cultures. From rural Brittany to Paris, to French Polynesia, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire illustrates an interdependence of culture and imperialism that continues to resonate in contemporary France.

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Lindsay Krasnoff, “The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010” (Lexington Books, 2012)

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 20:03:48 -0000

In 1967, an official of the French basketball federation lamented the team’s poor finish at that year’s European Championships in Finland. The French team finished sixth in their group of eight, and then lost in the first game of the knockout stage. The official noted that Europe’s top teams, such as the first-place Soviet Union, all had players over two meters tall (6’6″). The official summed up the disparity: “The giant [basketball player] is like an atomic armament. If a nation does not possess one, it is an unbalanced struggle.” The core of the complaint was simple: If France was to stand tall in the Cold War world, then it had to stand tall in the sports arena.

Historian Lindsay Krasnoff looks at this sports crisis in postwar France and the French government’s attempts to remedy it in her book The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010 (Lexington, 2012). Lindsay frames her study in two episodes of international athletic failure: the 1960 Rome Olympics, at which France won no gold medals and finished below Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey in the overall table, and the implosion of the national team at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Looking at the decades in between, Lindsay shows how leaders of the Fifth Republic, beginning with President Charles de Gaulle, sought to build a sporting culture, particularly through the training of young athletes. There have been successes. While officials once lamented the limits of French basketball talent, there are now more players from France on NBA rosters than from any other nation outside North America. But the rebellion on the practice pitch in South Africa was a reminder that the work of turning France into a consistent sporting power has been uneven. And the reactions of French officials, starting with President Sarkozy, show that this project remains one of national importance.

Note: the views that Lindsay expresses in the interview are hers alone and do not represent those of her employer, the U.S. Department of State, or the U.S. Government. Information presented here is based on publicly available, declassified sources and oral history interviews.

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Eric Jennings, “Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina” (University of California Press, 2011)

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 14:31:58 -0000

There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonialism. Developed by the French in the nineteenth century, Dalat remains a contemporary tourist destination fully equipped with a “Valley of Love”, an artificial lake with paddleboats, and cowboys. It is also the subject of Eric Jennings‘ Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011). In his impressive study, Jennings explores more than one hundred years in the history of this colonial and now postcolonial city. Over the course of fourteen chapters, the book examines issues of space and place; disease and health; colonial violence and injustice; culture and leisure; the impacts of war, race and ethnicity, class, gender, memory, and nostalgia.

Using Dalat’s past and present as a way into some of the deep contradictions and anxieties of French colonialism, the book is a stunning examination of a unique local context with broader implications for how we think empire and “Frenchness” together. Along the way, Jennings tells a series of fascinating stories, narratives of scientific debate and discovery; of murder and exploitation; of physical illness and recovery; and the attempt to create a French “home away from home” in the colonial mountains. Grounded in hitherto unexplored archival material, Imperial Heights opens up critical questions regarding the tensions and legacies of a French Indochina that was first made and then undone.

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Sanja Perovic, "The Calendar in Revolutionary France" (Cambridge UP, 2012)

Thu, 03 Oct 2013 08:00:00 -0000

Brumaire. Germinal. Thermidor. There is nothing more evocative of the French Revolutionary imaginary than the names of the months of the republican calendar that became official in 1793 (the calendar was back-dated to 1792, or Year I). In The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Sanja Perovic explores the history and meanings of the republican calendar as a representation of the complexities of revolutionaries' understandings of past, present, and future. As she examines the tensions between linear and cyclical visions of time during this pivotal period in French and world history, Perovic considers the calendar as both an object and an ideological project. The book is a history of the calendar itself and also a literary, intellectual, and political biography of Sylvain MarÃ©chal, a revolutionary who played a pivotal role in the development of the new temporal order.

Anyone who has ever wanted to know more about the massive cultural and political shifts of the French Revolution will be interested in reading this book. Perovic's narrative and arguments speak to a wide range of scholarship on republican values and culture, as well as to the broader periodization and historiography of the French Revolution. At the same time, the book reaches further, reading the republican calendar as exemplary of the bigger picture of modern temporality, offering the reader much to think about in terms of the time structures and habits we use to understand our daily lives and our places in history.

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Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite, “Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France” (LSU Press, 2013)

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 17:32:45 -0000

The stories of individual lives are endlessly complex, weaving together the contemporary events, the surrounding culture, and incorporating random factual odds and ends. This is one of the challenges of writing biography- one must become expert on so many things- and also one of the pleasures of reading it: the fact that a biography can reveal something not simply about another person, but also provide an in-depth glimpse into other worlds. Such is the case with Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite‘s Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) which, in the course of exploring a grisly unsolved murder, immerses the reader in the 1930s Paris underworld.

In 1937, Laetitia Toureaux was discovered in the first class car of ametrotrain with a 9-inch knife stuck in her neck. In Murder in the Metro, Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite untangle Toureaux’s complicated life–she was, at one time, simultaneously spying for the Italian government, the Paris police, and the French terrorist organization the Cagoule–in an effort to give a plausible explanation for how and why she might have died.

However, their work extends beyond sleuthing; Murder in the Metrois a gripping story, but it’s also an effort to call scholarly attention to the use of terrorism during France’s Third Republic and, following World War II, the subsequent downplaying–even, at times, obfuscation–of such acts. Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite write that, in 1937, Toureaux’s life and death “offered a perfect tableau for the press to explore and expound upon the issues of gender and, to a lesser extent, class.” Today, she still acts as a tableau of sorts, her history merging with that of the Cagoule to provide a canvas from which scholars–with Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite leading the charge–can explore the nuances of the times in which she lived: a period marked by progress and innovation, but also violence and political unrest, all set against the clouds of a fast-approaching war.

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Brian Sandberg, “Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)

Mon, 15 Jul 2013 13:40:31 -0000

Brian Sandberg‘s Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) significantly revises our understanding of early modern military culture and absolutism. By examining the frequent civil wars of the early seventeenth century in France, Sandberg demonstrates that the French nobility were neither merely resisting the spread of the absolutist state nor sitting idly by while modern economic and military forces swept them into obscurity. Rather, by examining the many local and regional conflicts of the era, Sandberg shows that the French nobles of the era were capable actors in a complex arena dominated by a culture of honor, sophisticated systems of credit, and dangerous civil conflicts.

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Elizabeth Foster, “Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940” (Stanford University Press, 2013)

Wed, 26 Jun 2013 13:44:51 -0000

How did French colonial administrators, missionaries, and different groups of Africans interact with one another in colonial Senegal? In her new book, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940 (Stanford University Press, 2013), historian Elizabeth Foster draws on a wealth of archival material to reveal the interests and negotiations of key powerbrokers in the colony from the end of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. Emphasizing the heterogeneity of French rule and the significance of local agency in its various forms, Foster interrogates the relationship between metropole and colony while exploring a religious landscape in Senegal that included French, African, and metis Catholics; Muslims; and animists.

The book’s chapters explore a variety of fascinating themes and events, from a scandal involving a nun accused of becoming pregnant in 1886, to the trial of an African accused of murdering a Wolof agent of the French empire, to the impact of the First World War and the Popular Front in colonial Senegal. Rethinking French republicanism, laicite, and assimilation in their colonial manifestations during the Third Republic, Faith in Empire has much to offer readers interested in debates about the imperial past and its legacies; historical and contemporary struggles over secularism; and the complicated relationship between religion and politics in France.

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Mary Louise Roberts, “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:29:59 -0000

Tracking soldiers from the villages and towns of Northern France, to the “Silver Foxhole” of Paris, to tribunals that convicted a disproportionate number of African-American soldiers of rape, Mary Louise Roberts‘ latest book reveals a side of the Liberation of 1944-45 that is typically obscured in histories of the D-Day landings and the months that followed. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (University of Chicago Press, 2013) draws on a wealth of material from French and American archives to show us that the war was an experience saturated with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch. Battles were critical, of course, but so too was sex.

The American GI in war-torn France was a soldier, a tourist, a liberator, and also a destroyer. Military propaganda represented the Normandy campaign as a soldier’s opportunity for sexual adventure, framing the invasion and occupation of France in terms of the rescue of damsels in distress by heroic tough guys from a manly nation. Convinced of the hyper-sexuality of French women and culture, many American soldiers courted, paid for sex with, and even assaulted women they met in French homes, streets, hotels, and brothels. This is a book about what American GIs thought about France; what they did while they were “over there”; how French women and men received and responded to the “advances” of American troops; and the lasting impact of this complex set of encounters on individual lives, communities, and politics.

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John E. Joseph, “Saussure” (Oxford UP, 2012)

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:31:50 -0000

Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. Yet when it comes to the man behind the ideas, most people know much less. Who was this man – this aristocrat with a Calvinist upbringing who shook the foundations of the linguistic establishment, and whose influence was felt more strongly after his death than it ever was in life?

When John Joseph started looking into these questions, he found only scattered information. As a result, he ended up having to write the book that he himself had wanted to read. The result, Saussure (OUP, 2012), is a detailed but nevertheless readable account of the life and works of one of the most respected figures in the history of linguistics.

In this interview we discuss some of the questions that arise in connection with Saussure: his major intellectual influences, his remarkable lack of publications during his adult life, the originality (and historical antecedents) of some of his central ideas, and “Calvinist linguistics”.

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Lisa Chaney, “Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life”

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:14:27 -0000

As a reader, biography offers not simply an opportunity to read about the life of another, but also an invitation to ponder the choices that are available in life, the choices that comprise a life. Towards the end of Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life(Penguin, 2011) biographer Lisa Chaney allows her subject to speak for herself. Chanel writes: ‘Today, alone in the sunshine and snow… I shall continue, without husband, without children, without grandchildren, without these delightful illusions… I am not a heroine. But I have chosen the person I wanted to be.’ Chanel’s is a life that, all these years later, still reads as radical, which puts into perspective how terribly shocking it must have appeared in the early 20th century.

Chaney has chosen an unusually challenging subject. Mired in myths, some of them of her own devising, the image of Chanel that has been passed down to us is clouded at best and, as Chaney acknowledges, quoting L.P. Hartley’s statement in The Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’

The story of Chanel’s life emerges in more muted tones than one might expect, with gray areas aplenty, from which it is unreasonable to demand clarity or place judgment.

And yet Coco Chanel remains an uncompromising account. Chaney doesn’t ignore Chanel’s capacity for storytelling but, rather, explores the meanings of her stories, their unrealities, and the significance of the details that Chanel chose to omit. She doesn’t side-step the controversies surrounding Chanel’s life during the occupation of Paris, but instead grapples head-on with the moral ambiguities and compromises that occurred during the Occupation and in Vichy France.

What emerges is an unflinching portrait of a complex, intelligent, unapologetic, incredibly hard working woman.

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E. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 13:26:29 -0000

By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and epistemological authority were produced amid the emergence of new Enlightenment publics. In Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760 (University of Chicago Press, 2012), controversies over digestion provided a space for the working out of power struggles between political, religious, medical, and culinary thinkers. Faced with a cuisine bursting with new materials and flavors, French society debated various ways of negotiating the opposing poles of indulgence and sobriety, luxury and reform. This is illustrated in several detailed case studies that include coffee and its implication in networks of expertise; cafes as social leveling-grounds, performance spaces, and chemical laboratories; and the production of new liqueurs. Spary’s work urges us to reconsider the way we write commodity histories, and is well worth reading. Enjoy!

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Laurent Dubois, “Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France” (University of California Press, 2011)

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 14:53:48 -0000

There are few moments in recent sports history as riveting, perplexing, and widely debated as Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt to Marco Materazzi in the final match of the 2006 World Cup. Think of your own reaction when the referee stopped play to attend to Materazzi, and you then saw the reply of Zidane trotting away from the Italian defender, turning back, and driving his head into Materazzi’s chest. Perhaps a cheer of approval, or scorn for the blatant foul. Then the red card came out, and with it the realization that Zidane’s brilliant career had come to an end. And as the camera followed him leaving the pitch, and he passed the World Cup trophy waiting on its pedestal, we understood that Zidane’s act of anger had likely cost his team the victory.

Laurent Dubois, scholar of modern French history and devoted supporter of Les Bleus, recognized that the head-butt and the reactions it generated in France were questions needing serious investigation. Finding the answers, he understood, required looking beyond whatever insults Materazzi shot at Zidane in the 109th minute of the final match. Laurent’s bookSoccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (University of California Press, 2011) sets Zidane’s act within multiple, overlapping frames: the history of the French national team and its traditionally multi-ethnic rosters; the development of football in France’s colonies; the experiences of immigrants from those colonies, like Zidane’s parents; the nationwide euphoria when France won the 1998 World Cup, with a team composed of players of Caribbean, New Caledonian, North African, and West African descent; and the poverty and social unrest in the banlieues of Paris and other French cities, where many of these players had grown up, which burst into violence in 2005. Against this backdrop, Laurent follows not only the story of Zidane but also that of his teammate on the national side, Lilian Thuram, a native of Guadeloupe who openly challenged the French government’s handling of the 2005 riots.

As Laurent explains in our interview, his research began as the personal quest of a fan seeking to understand the action of a player. But his book is about far more than football. Soccer Empire offers insight into contemporary Europe society, with its increasing population of immigrants from around the world, by looking through the lens of sport. And Laurent has opened an ongoing forum on soccer and society with his blog Soccer Politics, which offers his and other writers’ musings and research. For the thinking football fan, it is recommended reading on the larger significance of the game, in Europe and around the world.

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Paul Friedland, “Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment In France” (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 14:56:46 -0000

It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity–perhaps stashed somewhere in between idealized barricades or lurking on one chronological flank of the Eiffel Tower. The guillotine’s mechanization of official killing was instrumental in carrying out the thousands of executions that made the Terror what it was. Depictions of the revolutionary period often put the guillotine at center stage: atop a platform with a raucous audience at its feet and some noble man or woman about to put on–with the executioner’s aid–the finale to their ordeal. The guillotine is also often taken as a token of France’s human rights enlightenment. It made execution swift and supposedly painless.

Such characterizations miss an essential point: The guillotine was meant to make execution disappear. France’s republican founders sought efficiency and discretion in carrying out what they saw as a necessary evil. They had come to view execution as a sort of ultimate banishment, and not as an opportunity for an object lesson. It was a tool for getting rid of people–the quicker and quieter, the better. In fact, the French government finally put an end to public executions in 1939 when one particular guillotine collided with photo journalism. No matter how speedy the blade, the shutter was faster.

Historian Paul Friedland concludes his rich and expansive new book, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Punishment in France (Oxford University Press, 2012), by drawing back the curtain on this aspect of the guillotine’s past. Even more importantly, moreover, Friedland demonstrates that modern preoccupations with exemplary deterrence as a justification for punishment have led to distortions in how we understand public executions as they happened in the past. He begins his study in the medieval period, where he observes that public executions functioned mainly as rituals for repairing damage to the social fabric. He then follows the thread over half a millennium, tracing many evolutions in attitudes and practice, but never finding deterrence theory at work quite as some commentators have.

Paul Friedland is an affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University and a fellow of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2011-2012).

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Nancy Hargrove, “T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year” (University of Florida Press, 2010)

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 15:47:59 -0000

When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especially true with the modernists, in particular T.S. Eliot. After graduating from Harvard University in 1910, the young Eliot spent a year in Paris, a year that had a lasting and profound effect upon his work that has gone largely unexamined until now.

In her riveting intellectual biography, T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, Nancy Duvall Hargrove, the William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Mississippi State University, revisits that single year in the poet’s life to mine it for later influences.

While this period is often interpreted to be typical of the early 20th century post-graduate foreign study experience, Hargrove invites us view it as extra-ordinary. Linking Eliot’s work to the Ballets Russes, the music of Stravinsky and the intellectual tension ofLaNouvelle Revue Francaise, she demonstrates the rare coming together of an artist and the art of his time to form “un present parfait.”

It was a year that influenced not only his poetry but also his prose. As Hargrove writes, the theater Eliot encountered while in Paris “may have been the inspiration for the difficult dramatic goal which Eliot later set for himself: to write verse drama in an age conditioned to prose and to write of spiritual and moral concerns in an age largely devoid of and unsympathetic to them.”

But perhaps most impressive- especially to any lover of Paris- is Hargrove’s meticulous recreation of the city as it was then. Through chapters on sport, popular entertainment, transportation, etc., she elegantly situates the young poet amid a city so alive it seems to strain against the page. The end result is a book that leaves the reader longing for both the poetry and Paris.

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Carolina Armenteros, “The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854” (Cornell UP, 2011)

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:00:01 -0000

When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “The Enlightenment” in which we read all the thinkers of, well, “The Enlightenment.” I came to understand that they were the “good guys” of Western history, at least for most folks. We also read, as a kind of coda, a bit about the “Counter-Enlightenment,” of which you may never have heard. The writers of the Counter-Enlightenment were, I learned, the “bad guys” of Western history, for they (apparently) didn’t like reason, truth, progress and all that. First among the black-hats was Joseph de Maistre. He believed the French Revolution was “satanic,” as were the ideas behind it. Or so I thought until I read Carolina Armenteros‘ excellent book The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854 (Cornell University Press, 2011). Turns out de Maistre was a good deal more subtle and thoughtful than the “received view” of him suggests, and Carolina does a marvelous job of making plain how and why. In this interview, Carolina explains not only the complexity of his thought, but also that he wasn’t really French, let alone a black-hat wearing reactionary.

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Carolyn Burke, “No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf” (Knopf, 2011)

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 12:00:04 -0000

Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s.

And yet, so often Piaf’s high-spirits are used against her and her life is made to fit the standard template of the tortured artist: early ambition, a meteoric rise to fame, a string of meaningless love affairs and substance abuse leading to an early death.

In light of this tendency, Carolyn Burke‘s No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf (Knopf, 2011) serves as a much needed corrective, breathing life back into the chanteuse’s legacy. During her short life Piaf consistently demonstrated an extraordinary boldness- in her relationships, yes, but also in her singing, her spirituality, her artistic collaborations and her commitment to France during World War II.

And the music! That voice! “Non Je Ne Regrette Rien” seems to pulse beneath the text of Burke’s book and, reading it, one cannot help but be steered back to Piaf’s records. Burke was undoubtedly conscious of this as it’s where she got her title.

“That kid Piaf tears your guts out.” So said Maurice Chevalier after hearing the 19-year-old newcomer sing in a Parisian nightclub. Nearly 50 years after death, as No Regrets proves, she still does.

*No Regrets will be available in paperback on April 1, 2012, from Chicago Review Press.

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Andrew Curran, “The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011)

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:28:45 -0000

We’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history of “Whiteness.” Today we’ll return to the history of racial ideas and listen to Andrew Curranexplain the history of “Blackness.”

Doubtless Europeans have noted that different humans from different parts of the globe lookdifferent for millennia. But it was only relatively recently, as Curran explains in The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), that they took a serious interest inexplaining these differences in a manner we would call “scientific.” There are two major reasons for this tardiness. First, metaphysical and biblical schemes provided the primary context for the interpretation of the human until the mid eighteenth century. Second, the most important scientific communities in Europe-those of France and England-only began to examine the African in earnest at the same time that their plantation- and slave-based colonies in the Caribbean came on line in the seventeenth century. “Colonial expansion” and “Scientific Revolution” ran together, it seems, and it is in their confluence that we see the origins of modern color-based racial discourse.

That discourse, as Curran shows, was first worked out in what are sometimes called “Travel Accounts,” books that look for all the world like ethnographies. Europeans wrote thousands of them about every corner of the globe (Full disclosure: long ago I wrote a book about early European ethnographies of Old Russia). These books, in turn, provided grist (or “data”?) for the scientific mills of “naturalists” back home. At the same time these naturalists were looking outward for the origins of human difference, other scientifically-minded types were looking inwards. They were medical doctors, and more particularly anatomists. They wondered why, in the mechanical sense, black skin was black, and so they took black skin apart looking for mechanisms. And of course these twin discourses, ethnographic and medical, were intertwined with a third–that centered on the ethics of the then booming Atlantic slave-trade. Europeans wondered what science could tell them about the rightness or wrongness of African slavery.

This is an important contribution to an important topic. But it is also a model of how intellectual history should be done. Curran moves well beyond the parade of Big Thinkers that have long dominated the history of ideas. He reads them, to be sure, but he also reads what they read. By this technique, he moves deeper and deeper into the culture of ethnography, anatomy, and slavery in search of the origins and forms of “Blackness.”

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Jeffrey H. Jackson, “Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2010)

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 17:07:19 -0000

In the late 19th century, French sociologist Emile Durkheim warned the world about spreading “normlessness” (anomie). He claimed that modern society, and particularly life in concentrated urban-industrial areas like Paris, left people without the sense of belonging that characterized “traditional” life. Durkheim was not alone in thinking that there was something fundamentally sick-making about modernity. Marx called the modern malady “alienation” (Entfremdung), Weber called it “disenchantment” (Entzauberung), and Freud called it “discontent” (Unbehagen). The more general term used in fin de siecle Europe was “neurasthenia,” a condition of nervous exhaustion caused by the frenetic pace of modern life.

The theory that modernity was pathological was put to the test on several occasions in the early twentieth century. One of the earliest was the Paris flood of 1910. It’s the subject of Jeffrey H. Jackson‘s wonderfully told tale Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2010). By Jackson’s revealing lights, social science did not fare very well. When the Seine river literally rose up out of the ground and over its banks, things in Paris did not fall apart as Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and Freud might have predicted. Far from it: the Parisians generally pulled together, fought the rising waters, and helped one another. They were not “normless,” “alienated,” “disenchanted,” or “discontented.” They knew just who they were: French citizens. They knew just what to do: lend a hand. And they knew just why they did it: national duty. This isn’t to say that some sort of ideal democracy magically emerged out of the flood waters. It didn’t. As is always the case, people in desperate situations do desperate (and often stupid) things. The deluge ripped the veneer of normalcy from daily life and revealed underlying conflicts. But more than anything else the Paris flood revealed the remarkable strength of modern republican nation-states. Unlike their much praised “traditional” counterparts–the monarchies of early modern Europe–they did not fall apart when put under significant strain. They cohered and even grew stronger.

We shouldn’t think, however, that this solidarity was an entirely good thing. National unity had a much darker side, as would be shown only a few years later. Nations are often very good at helping themselves, as the Paris flood demonstrated. But they are also very good (if “good” is the right word) at fighting other nations, as was demonstrated with horrible clarity in World War I and World War II.

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Ruth Harris, “Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century” (Henry Holt, 2010)

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 19:08:03 -0000

If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill-fitting glove, and charges of racism. I watched every bit of it and remember exactly where I was when the verdict was announced. But if you are French (which is a nice thing to be), then there is only one “Trial of the Century” and it involved an honorable though stuffy army captain, a torn up note of no significance, a bungling military establishment, and charges of anti-Semitism. The erstwhile American football player (and actor, don’t forget he was an actor) was guilty, pretty much everyone knew it, but no one really wanted to take the issue on. The aloof French officer was innocent, pretty much everyone knew it too, but in this instance a kind of culture war broke out.

France circa 1900 was at a fork in the historical road: on the left, the liberalism of the Revolution; on the right, the conservatism of the post-Napoleonic settlement. So which was it to be: France a nation of free-thinking citizens or France a nation of Catholic Frenchmen? The question was not definitively answered during the Dreyfus Affair, but new (and somewhat disturbing) possibilities were sketched out. The analysis of these new paths is one (among many) of the great strengths of Ruth Harris‘s new book Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (Henry Holt, 2010) . She shows that both sides–the Dreyfusards (aka “Intellectuals”) and the Anti-Intellectuals–used the Affair to elaborate their visions for France and, in the process, worked themselves into a tizzy. They began to believe things that, well, only a lunatic could believe. French political culture entered a kind of surreal moment (a bit like American political culture during the O.J. trial if you ask me). Alas, the French didn’t quickly come back to reality after the Affair ended. They organized parties and continued to fight. And they are still fighting.

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Richard Fogarty, “Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008)

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:51:27 -0000

The thing about empire building is that when you’re done building one, you’ve got to figure out what to do with it. This generally involves the “extraction of resources.” We tend to think of this in terms of things like gold, oil, or rubber. But people can be “extracted” as well. The French empire of the later nineteenth century offers a case in point. Havingfound themselves in a very nasty war with the Germans, the French decided that it might be useful to enlist their African and Southeast Asian colonials in the fighting. As Richard Fogarty demonstrates in his excellent new book Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), this effort to draft the colonials led to no end of paradoxes. France was the home of Republicanism, and Republicans are supposed to be keen on liberte, egalite, fraternite. But the colonials weren’t at liberty–they were subjects. Neither were they equal–they enjoyed few of the rights of the native French. And of course they weren’t brothers–rather they were “children” of France. Yet the French felt free to ask their colonial underlings to undertake the highest act of civic sacrifice, namely, to fight and die for la Patrie. Would this sacrifice earn themliberte, egalite, fraternite? No. In fact, it didn’t earn them much but a hellish trip to what looked like the end of the world. For, as Fogarty shows, French racism trumped French Republicanism throughout the war (and after, one might add). The colonial soldiers were segregated, stereotyped, and often used as cannon fodder. Some French felt bad about this. But most didn’t. After all, the colonials needed to be “civilized” in order to enjoy the fruits of Republicanism, and presumably the French believed that asking them to die for their would-be motherland would help accomplish this feat. All it probably did was engender bitterness, as the French were to discover some decades later when their empire slipped away.

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New Books in French Studies

Aurore Spiers, "Archiving the Past: Women's Film History in France, 1927–1978" (U California Press, 2026)

Penny Roberts, "Huguenot Networks: Truth and Secrecy in Sixteenth-Century Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Andrew W. M. Smith, "Make Cheese Not War: Transnational Resistance and the Larzac in Modern France" (Manchester UP, 2026)

Leslie Barnes, "Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

Michaela Hulstyn, "Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

Marta Lorimer, "Europe As Ideological Resource: European Integration and Far Right Legitimation in France and Italy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

The Club: Where American Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris

Claire Goldstein, "Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France" (Northwestern UP, 2025)

Michael Bycroft, "Gems and the New Science: Matter and Value in the Scientific Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Maud Anne Bracke, "Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Feminism, Contraception, and Abortion, 1950-1980 (Oxford UP, 2025)

Jennifer Boum Make, "Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean" (Rutgers UP, 2025)

Richard Vinen, "The Last Titans: How Churchill and De Gaulle Saved Their Nations and Transformed the World" (Simon & Schuster, 2026)

E. T. Dailey, "Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Veronique Boone, "Le Corbusier on Camera: The Unknown Films of Ernest Weissmann" (Birkhaüser, 2024)

Michèle Schaal, "Grrrl Writing: Virginie Despentes's Authorial Politics" (Peter Lang, 2026)

Andrea Mansker, "Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Sally Frances Low, "Colonial Law Making: Cambodia Under the French" (NUS Press, 2023)

Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Claire Nicolas, "Une si longue course: Sport, genre, et citoyenneté au Ghana et en Côte d’Ivoire (années 1900-1970)" (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024)

Cindy Anh Nguyen, "Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam" (U California Press, 2026)

Olivier Esteves et al., "France, You Love It but Leave It: The Silent Flight of French Muslims" (Polity, 2025)

164 Maurice Samuels: Jewish Assimilation, Integration and the Dreyfus Affair (JP)

Andrew Billing, "Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-century Liberal Political Writing" (Routledge, 2023)

Jacqueline Couti and Anny Dominique Curtius, "Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, "By the Power Vested in Me: How Experts Shape Same-Sex Marriage Debates" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, "Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Susannah Wilson, "A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Matthijs Lok, "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Stuart Carroll, "Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Matt Dawson, "The Political Durkheim: Sociology, Socialism, Legacies" (Routledge, 2023)

Andrew S. Curran, "Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson" (Other Press, 2026)

Susan McCready, "Commemorative Acts: French Theatre and the Memory of the Great War" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Maddalena Alvi, "The European Art Market and the First World War: Art, Capital, and the Decline of the Collecting Class, 1910–1925" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Hannah Frydman, "Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press ﻿Freedom in France" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Aubrey Gabel, "The Politics of Play: Oulipo and the Legacy of French Literary Ludics" (Northwestern UP, 2025)

Melissa Byrnes, "Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Rachel Jean-Baptiste, "Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Chad Augustine Córdova, "Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France" (Northwestern UP, 2025)

Carolyn J. Eichner, "Feminism's Empire" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Darcie Fontaine, "Modern France and the World" (Routledge, 2023)

Mary Edwards, "Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Melodie H. Eichbauer, "Law in a Culture of Theology: The Use of Canon Law by Parisian Theologians, Ca. 1120-Ca. 1220" (Routledge, 2025)

Bryan A. Banks, "Write to Return: Huguenot Refugees on the Frontiers of the French Enlightenment" (McGill-Queen's, 2024)

Julie Fette, "Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature" (Routledge, 2025)

Sarah Griswold, "Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Kathryn Robson, "Beyond the Happy Ending: Imagining Happiness in Contemporary French Women's Writing and Film" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Maurice Samuels, "Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair" (Yale UP, 2024)

Paul Galvez, "Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting" (Yale UP, 2022)

William Doyle, "Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

Gianna Englert, "Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Madeleine Chalmers, "French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

Daniel J. Sherman, "Sensations: French Archaeology Between Science and Spectacle, 1890-1940" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Miranda Spieler, "Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Justine De Young, "The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern Women and Modern Artists in Impressionist Paris" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Michelle Bumatay, "On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power" (Ohio State UP, 2025)

Eric T. Jennings, "Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean" (Yale UP, 2025)

Matt Myers, "The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968-1989" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Todd McGowan, "The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Natacha Chetcuti-Osorovitz and Sara Garbagnoli "La Pensée Wittig: Une Introduction" (Payot, 2025)

I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom

Alex R. Tipei, "Unintended Nations: How French Liberals' Empire of Civilization Remade Southeast Europe and the Post-Napoleonic World" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025)

Kevin Passmore, "The Maginot Line: A New History of the Fall of France" (Yale UP, 2025)

Laura Hobson Faure, "Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust" (Yale UP, 2025)

Christopher C. Gorham, "Matisse at War: Art and Resistance in Nazi Occupied France" (Citadel Press, 2025)

Robert Ivermee, "Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Chris Millington, "A History of Fascism in France: From the First World War to the National Front" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Diana Souhami, "No Modernism Without Lesbians" (Head of Zeus Book, 2020)

Jérémy Filet, "The Jacobites and the Grand Tour: Educational Travel and Small-States' Diplomacy" (Manchester UP, 2025)

Peter K. Andersson, "The Dandy: A People's History of Sartorial Splendour" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mark Braude, "The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba from Empire to Exile" (Penguin Press, 2018)

Charly Coleman, "The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Christy Pichichero, "The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon" (Cornell UP, 2018)

Julian Jackson, "De Gaulle" (Harvard UP, 2018)

Margaret Cook Andersen, "Fertile Expectations: The Politics of Involuntary Childlessness in Twentieth-Century France" (Manchester UP, 2025)

Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira, "Ascending Republic: The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France" (MIT Press, 2025)

Julie Singer, "Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature" (U ﻿Chicago Press, 2025)

Elise Franklin "Disintegrating Empire: Algerian Family Migration and the Limits of the Welfare State in France" (University of Nebraska Press, 2024)

Selda Altan, "Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan-Indochina Railway" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Hannah Frydman, "Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Julie Singer, "Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2025)