New Books in French Studies
528 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★ - 15 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of France about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Miranda Spieler, “Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana” (Harvard University Press, 2012)
March 28, 2014 10:58 - 56 minutesIn 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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingc...
Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeffrey H. Jackson, eds. “The Thinking Space” (Ashgate, 2013)
March 27, 2014 10:23 - 1 hourBelieve 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....
Ellen J. Amster, “Medicine and the Saints” (University of Texas Press, 2013)
March 16, 2014 09:49 - 1 hourWhat 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 (cosmologi...
Colette Colligan, “A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris 1890-1960” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014)
March 10, 2014 11:31 - 59 minutesFrom 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. Troubli...
Camille Robcis, “The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France” (Cornell UP, 2013)
February 05, 2014 15:24 - 1 hourOnly 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 As...
Kathleen Wellman, “Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France” (Yale UP, 2013)
January 21, 2014 13:36 - 1 hourQueens 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 republi...
Sandrine Sanos, “The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France” (Stanford University Press, 2013)
January 05, 2014 11:45 - 1 hourSandrine 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 civi...
Jennifer Sessions, “By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria” (Cornell UP, 2011)
December 21, 2013 11:31 - 1 hourEarly 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, imp...
Daniel Sherman, "French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945-1975" (U Chicago Press, 2011)
December 05, 2013 09:00 - 59 minutesThe "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 Musée 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 Pres...
Lindsay Krasnoff, “The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010” (Lexington Books, 2012)
November 14, 2013 20:03 - 45 minutesIn 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 p...
Eric Jennings, “Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina” (University of California Press, 2011)
October 29, 2013 14:31 - 1 hourThere 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 In...
Sanja Perovic, "The Calendar in Revolutionary France" (Cambridge UP, 2012)
October 03, 2013 08:00 - 1 hourBrumaire. 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 revolutionari...
Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite, “Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France” (LSU Press, 2013)
July 31, 2013 17:32 - 51 minutesThe 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 ...
Brian Sandberg, “Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)
July 15, 2013 13:40 - 57 minutesBrian 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 obscuri...
Elizabeth Foster, “Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940” (Stanford University Press, 2013)
June 26, 2013 13:44 - 1 hourHow 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. Emphas...
Mary Louise Roberts, “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
May 24, 2013 15:29 - 1 hourTracking 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 ...
John E. Joseph, “Saussure” (Oxford UP, 2012)
May 20, 2013 14:31 - 50 minutesPretty 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 ...
Lisa Chaney, “Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life”
April 01, 2013 14:14 - 53 minutesAs 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...
E. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
February 18, 2013 13:26 - 1 hourBy 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 Eatin...
Laurent Dubois, “Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France” (University of California Press, 2011)
August 24, 2012 14:53 - 58 minutesThere 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...
Paul Friedland, “Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment In France” (Oxford University Press, 2012)
July 16, 2012 14:56 - 58 minutesIt 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 p...
Nancy Hargrove, “T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year” (University of Florida Press, 2010)
June 15, 2012 15:47 - 1 hourWhen 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 Will...
Carolina Armenteros, “The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854” (Cornell UP, 2011)
April 06, 2012 17:00 - 55 minutesWhen 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 ...
Carolyn Burke, “No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf” (Knopf, 2011)
March 01, 2012 12:00 - 45 minutesEdith 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 Regre...
Andrew Curran, “The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011)
October 10, 2011 19:28 - 54 minutesWe’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...
Jeffrey H. Jackson, “Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2010)
August 13, 2010 17:07 - 1 hourIn 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...
Ruth Harris, “Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century” (Henry Holt, 2010)
June 17, 2010 19:08 - 1 hourIf 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,...
Richard Fogarty, “Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008)
November 03, 2008 03:51 - 1 hourThe 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 ...