New Books In French Studies

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” sh

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

"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

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,

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

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 (UG

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Awa

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. Unders

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

“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 a

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

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 theoreti

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

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 u

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

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

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. 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 Hano

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, h

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, t