New Books in French Studies
519 episodes - English - Latest episode: 1 day ago - ★★★★ - 15 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of France about their New Books
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Episodes
Alexander Statman, "A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
April 25, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesAlexander 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 ...
Jeremy Black, "Paris: A Short History" (Thames & Hudson, 2024)
April 20, 2024 08:00 - 39 minutesOnce 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 ce...
Liz Tregenza, "Wholesale Couture: London and Beyond, 1930-70" (Bloombury, 2023)
April 17, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesWholesale 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 ...
Kerry Wallach, "Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit" (Penn State UP, 2024)
April 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourGraphic 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 ar...
Tzafrir Barzilay, "Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBetween 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 an...
Sarah Horowitz, "The Red Widow: The Scandal That Shook Paris and the Woman Behind It All" (Sourcebooks, 2022)
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourSex. 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. ...
Marie de Vignerot, Richelieu's Forgotten Advisor and Heiress
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesDespite 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 ...
Oliver Wunsch, "A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France" (Penn State UP, 2024)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesEighteenth-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 collector...
W. B. Allen, "Montesquieu's 'The Spirit of the Laws': A Critical Edition" (Anthem Press, 2023)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesThe 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 m...
Stefanos Geroulanos, "The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins" (Liveright, 2024)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBooks 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...
Aaron Clift, "Anticommunism in French Society and Politics, 1945-1953" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAnticommunism 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 mo...
Ada Maria Kuskowski, "Vernacular Law; Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
March 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourCustom 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 ...
Julie Kalman, "The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World During the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 14, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesOn 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...
Ali Bhagat, "Governing the Displaced: Race and Ambivalence in Global Capitalism" (Cornell UP, 2024)
March 14, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesGoverning 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 hum...
Yolanda Ariadne Collins, "Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield" (U California Press, 2024)
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesForests 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 RED...
Angie Chau, "Paris and the Art of Transposition: Early Twentieth Century Sino-French Encounters" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
March 06, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesA 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) unc...
Tom Hamilton, "A Widow's Vengeance After the Wars of Religion: Gender and Justice in Renaissance France" (Oxford UP, 2024)
February 19, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesParis, 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...
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, "Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia" (Princeton UP, 2023)
February 18, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourHow 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 ...
Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss, "The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV's France" (Getty, 2022)
February 17, 2024 09:00 - 48 minutesMediterranean 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...
Alison M. Downham Moore, "The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 14, 2024 09:00 - 45 minutesIn 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 doct...
Ridley Scott's "Napoleon": A Historian's Review
January 28, 2024 09:00 - 22 minutesCharles 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. 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 Resear...
Marcia Stephenson, "Llamas beyond the Andes: Untold Histories of Camelids in the Modern World" (U Texas Press, 2023)
January 27, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesCamelids 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 Worl...
Lewis Wade, "Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France: Marine Insurance, War and the Atlantic Empire Under Louis XIV" (Boydell Press, 2023)
January 19, 2024 09:00 - 54 minutesPrivilege, 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 m...
Judith Surkis, "Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930" (Cornell UP, 2019)
January 12, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourJudith 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 ex...
Jennifer Cazenave, "An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah" (SUNY Press, 2019)
January 08, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourJennifer 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 ...
Emma Kuby, "Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps After 1945" (Cornell UP, 2019)
January 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourEmma 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...
Sara Rahnama, "The Future Is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria" (Cornell UP, 2023)
January 07, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesWhen 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....
Colin Jones, "The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris" (Oxford UP, 2021)
January 05, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesThe 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 wor...
Virginia Chieffo Raguin, "The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Time" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
January 05, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesThe 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’...
Kate Kirkpatrick, "Becoming Beauvoir: A Life" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
January 05, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesKate 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 ...
William G. Pooley, "Body and Tradition in 19th-Century France: Félix Arnaudin and the Moorlands of Gascony, 1870-1914" (Oxford UP, 2019)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesThe 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 ...
Ronen Steinberg, "The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France" (Cornell UP, 2019)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourHow 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 commemorati...
Patrick Ffrench, "Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourSuspicious 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 -...
Marixa Lasso, "Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal" (Harvard UP, 2019)
December 26, 2023 09:00 - 36 minutesMany 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 netwo...
Stuart Elden, “Foucault: The Birth of Power” (Polity Press, 2017)
December 26, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesHow 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 recentl...
George MacLeod, "Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony After the Cold War" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
December 24, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourGeorge 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 Kalashniko...
Kelly Ricciardi Colvin, "Charm Offensive: Commodifying Femininity in Postwar France" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
December 22, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesIn 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 fem...
Anne E. Linton, "Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
December 22, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourA 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 ran...
Katlyn Marie Carter, "Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions" (Yale UP, 2023)
December 19, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesKatlyn 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 cam...
Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, "Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
December 19, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday 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 Ameri...
Troels Burchall Henningsen, "Western Intervention and Informal Politics: Simulated Statebuilding and Failed Reforms" (Routledge, 2021)
December 15, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWestern 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 protra...
Sally Frances Low, "Colonial Law Making: Cambodia Under the French" (NUS Press, 2023)
December 15, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesIn 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...
Jonathan Sumption, "Triumph and Illusion: The Hundred Years War, Vol. 5" (Faber & Faber, 2023)
December 14, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesTriumph 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 t...
Yan Slobodkin, "The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies" (Cornell UP, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesThe 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 ...
Poppy Corbett et al., "Creative Histories of Witchcraft: France, 1790–1940" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
November 30, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourHow 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 for...
E. T. Dailey, "Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen" (Oxford UP, 2023)
November 26, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourA 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 ...
Jenny Benham, "International Law in Europe, 700–1200" (Manchester UP, 2022)
November 24, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWas 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 bo...
Elizabeth M. Perego, "Humor and Power in Algeria, 1920 to 2021" (Indiana UP, 2023)
November 20, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesIn 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 civilia...
Emma R. Jones, "Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
November 13, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesMany 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,...
Musab Younis, "On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought" (U California Press, 2022)
November 13, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesOn 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, jo...