New Books in French Studies
528 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★ - 15 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of France about their New Books
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Episodes
Michael K. Beauchamp, "Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815" (LSU Press, 2021)
July 27, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesM. 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 posse...
Skye Cleary, "How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment" (St. Martin's Press, 2022)
July 27, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesSkye 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-ren...
Christina B. Carroll, "The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, 1850–1900" (Cornell UP, 2022)
July 15, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesIn 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 inters...
Karen Offen, "Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
July 14, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesWhile 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...
Lilianne Milgrom, "L' Origine: The Secret Life of the World's Most Erotic Masterpiece" (Girl Friday Books, 2021)
June 15, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutesToday 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, v...
Virginia Reinburg, "Storied Places: Pilgrim Shrines, Nature, and History in Early Modern France" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
June 10, 2022 08:00 - 41 minutesToday 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 societ...
Geoffrey Kurtz, "Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social Democracy" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2014)
June 10, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourJean 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...
Daniel Fairfax, "The Red Years of Cahiers Du Cinéma (1968-1973)" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)
June 03, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe 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 establishme...
Paul Galvez, "Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting" (Yale UP, 2022)
June 02, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourBetween 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 nat...
Ashley M. Williard, "Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
May 30, 2022 08:00 - 48 minutesIn 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, a...
Jacob Collins, "The Anthropological Turn: French Political Thought After 1968" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
May 26, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourJacob 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, citizensh...
Adriana Alfaro Altamirano, "The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
May 19, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesWithin 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 insigh...
Carolyn J. Eichner, "The Paris Commune: A Brief History" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
May 18, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourCarolyn 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...
Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden, "From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2022)
May 11, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesToday’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 monop...
Piotr H. Kosicki, "Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and 'Revolution,' 1891-1956" (Yale UP, 2018)
May 09, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesIn 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 regi...
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)
May 06, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn 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 disa...
Joan DeJean, "Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast" (Basic, 2022)
May 02, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesIn 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 imposs...
Charly Coleman, "The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment" (Stanford UP, 2021)
April 25, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourCharly 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 t...
Lisa Reilly, "The Invention of Norman Visual Culture: Art, Politics, and Dynastic Ambition" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
April 20, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesIn 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 i...
Yveline Alexis, "Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
April 11, 2022 08:00 - 48 minutesHaiti 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 peop...
Elisabeth Anderson, "Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State" (Princeton UP, 2021)
April 11, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe 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 Eur...
Alice Jardine, "At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
April 08, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesAt 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 t...
Louis K. Epstein, "The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France" (Boydell, 2021)
April 06, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesPatronage 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 institution...
Nu-Anh Tran, "Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
April 01, 2022 08:00 - 41 minutesIn 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 revolution...
Abigail Susik, "Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work" (Manchester UP, 2021)
March 31, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAccording 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 ...
Elayne Oliphant, "The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris" (UChicago Press, 2021)
March 25, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesFrance, 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 t...
Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, "All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State" (Oxford UP, 2022)
March 18, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesAll 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 challe...
Tessa Murphy, "The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
March 16, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn 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 ...
Daniel Chirot, "You Say You Want a Revolution?: Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences" (Princeton UP, 2020)
March 07, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourWhy 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 t...
Eliza Jane Smith, "Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France" (Lexington Books, 2021)
March 04, 2022 09:00 - 47 minutesEliza 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 ...
Sarah Farmer, "Rural Inventions: The French Countryside After 1945" (Oxford UP, 2020)
March 01, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourSarah 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 uncha...
Peter Salmon, "An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida" (Verso, 2020)
February 25, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourWho 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 misappropriate...
Sarah Shortall, "Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics" (Harvard UP, 2021)
February 21, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesIn 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 inspirin...
Patricia Tilburg, "Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919" (Oxford UP, 2019)
February 16, 2022 05:00 - 1 hourPatricia 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 pleasur...
Stuart Elden, "The Early Foucault" (Polity Press, 2021)
February 11, 2022 09:00 - 51 minutesIt 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 El...
Nathaniel L. Moir, "Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare" (Oxford UP, 2021)
February 08, 2022 09:00 - 45 minutesIn 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 a...
Micah Alpaugh, "Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
February 07, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourAs 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 Am...
Marco Wyss, "Postcolonial Security: Britain, France, and West Africa's Cold War" (Oxford UP, 2021)
February 07, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn 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 Afri...
Susan Gilson Miller, "Years of Glory: Nelly Benatar and the Pursuit of Justice in Wartime North Africa" (Stanford UP, 2021)
February 03, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourWhen 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. I...
Rita Koganzon, "Liberal States, Authoritarian Families: Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought" (Oxford UP, 2021)
February 03, 2022 09:00 - 50 minutesRita 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 responsib...
Jeffrey H. Jackson, "Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis" (Algonquin Books, 2020)
January 28, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourWant 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 regard...
Megan Moore, "The Erotics of Grief: Emotions and the Construction of Privilege in the Medieval Mediterranean" (Cornell UP, 2021)
January 24, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesThe 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 o...
Brenna Moore, "Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
January 20, 2022 11:00 - 59 minutesIn 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 midd...
Julie Kleinman, "Adventure Capital: Migration and the Making of an African Hub in Paris" (U California Press, 2019)
January 14, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesEvery 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-f...
Martin Conway, "Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968" (Princeton UP, 2021)
January 03, 2022 09:00 - 41 minutesWhat 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 West...
Aro Velmet, "Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, Its Colonies, and the World" (Oxford UP, 2020)
December 31, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourAro 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 "c...
Diana S. Kim, "Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition Across Southeast Asia" (Princeton UP, 2020)
December 30, 2021 09:00 - 57 minutesIn 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 gran...
Michel Foucault, "Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970-1980)" (U of Minnesota Press, 2021)
December 20, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourIntolerable: 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 Frenc...
Jennifer Ferng and Lauren R. Cannady, "Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks" (Voltaire Foundation, 2021)
December 08, 2021 09:00 - 52 minutesA 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 ...
Philip Larratt-Smith and Juliet Mitchell, "Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter" (Yale UP, 2021)
December 08, 2021 09:00 - 55 minutesFrom 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 p...