Podcasts by New Books in French Studies
Interviews with Scholars of France about their New Books
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Further podcasts by Marshall Poe
Podcast on the topic Gesellschaft und Kultur
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On Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" from 2022-12-15T09:00
The French writer Marcel Proust was fascinated by life. But he was even more interested in how we perceive life. In 1908, when he was in his late 30s, he began to write a novel that explored themes...
ListenOn Voltaire's "Candide" from 2022-12-14T09:00
Many people made the European Enlightenment, but probably nobody better represents the movement’s spirit than the French writer and philosopher Voltaire. He was a man of letters and strong critic o...
ListenOn Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" from 2022-11-29T09:00
In 1925, on the French occupied island of Martinique, one of the most prominent voices in post colonial theory was born, Frantz Fanon. He was born to parents of both African and French descent, and...
ListenOn Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" from 2022-11-22T09:23
We moderns often tell ourselves a story that goes something like this: The past was barbaric, especially when it came to punishing criminals or persecuting minorities. Legal punishment used to incl...
ListenOn Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "The Social Contract" from 2022-11-03T08:00
The 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that humans are born good, but society corrupts them. He was unimpressed with the fixation on wealth that he saw in the French society. In ...
ListenOn Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" from 2022-10-25T08:00
In her diary, Simone de Beauvoir once wrote “I did not think of myself as a 'woman.' I was me.” Then, in 1949, de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, laying bare the widely accepted gender inequalit...
ListenOn Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" from 2022-09-27T08:00
Over 150 years later, Les Miserables is a story that still resonates with readers and audiences around the world. The story highlighted the unjust social class system of 19th century France by movi...
ListenOn Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions" from 2022-09-15T08:00
Jean-Jacques Rousseau led an interesting life. He was a philosopher, writer, and music composer in the 18th century. Rousseau believed that society has an enormous influence on human development an...
ListenOn "Encyclopédie" from 2022-09-02T08:00
One of the earliest modern encyclopedias was printed in France in the 18th century. Unlike many encyclopedias that came before it, this text was written in French instead of Latin, which was the la...
ListenOn Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days" from 2022-08-02T08:00
When French author Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days in the late 1800s, scheduled global travel was practically science fiction, and 80 days seemed impossibly fast. But his techno-futur...
ListenOn Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days" from 2022-08-02T08:00
When French author Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days in the late 1800s, scheduled global travel was practically science fiction, and 80 days seemed impossibly fast. But his techno-futur...
ListenAndrew S. Curran, "Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely" (Other Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Denis Diderot has long been regarded as one of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment, thanks to his editorship of the influential multi-volume Encyclopédie. As Andrew S. Curran explains i...
ListenPaola Bertucci, "Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2018) is an innovative new look at the role of artisans in the French Enlighte...
ListenMcKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...
ListenDanna Agmon, "A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India" (Cornell UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
People sometimes forget—if they are even aware—that France’s empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a colonial presence in South Asia, a presence that at one time rivaled that ...
ListenShannon Fogg, “Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942-1947” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
While the history of the Second World War and Jewish persecution in France has been widely studied, the return of survivors in the aftermath of deportation and genocide has not received sufficient ...
ListenPatricia Lorcin and Todd Shepard, “French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories” (U Nebraska Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Following a 2011 meeting of the annual Mediterranean Workshop at the University of Minnesota, Patricia Lorcin (a co-convener) approached Todd Shepard (one of the workshop participants that year) ab...
ListenVenus Bivar, “Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France” (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Venus Bivar documents the development of agriculture in post-1944 France. T...
ListenHervé Guillemain, “Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History” (Alma, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Schizophrènes au XXe siècle: des effets secondaires de l’histoire [Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History] is a strong argument in support of the history of psychiatry...
ListenLaila Amine, “Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light” (U Wisconsin Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
At the heart of Laila Amine’s book is a crucial question: where is Paris? This question may be surprising for anyone who can readily point to the French capital on a map. Geography is, after all st...
ListenLudivine Broch, “Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French Railwaymen and the Second World War” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
This spring and summer, the workers of the Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF) staged a series of rolling strikes, slowing and shutting down the country’s major lines of travel and...
ListenJonathan Smyth, “Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being: The Search for a Republican Morality” (Manchester UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his speech delivered to the National Convention on 18 Floréal (May 7, 1794), Maximilien Robespierre shocked his listeners as he attacked the proponents of atheism and dechristianization in the g...
ListenRichard S. Hopkins, “Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris” (LSU Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Beginning in the mid-1800s, Paris experienced an unprecedented growth in the development of parks, squares, and gardens. This greenspace was part of Napoleon III’s plan for a new, modern Paris and ...
ListenThe Invisible Committee, “Now” (Semiotext(e), 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What could the communism of the future be? In Now (Semiotext(e), 2017), The Invisible Committee explores our current crisis by thinking through key critical theory questions, along with specific i...
ListenDarcie Fontaine, “Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What role did Christianity play in Algeria before, during, and after the war of independence? In Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (Cambridge Universit...
ListenPeter Sahlins, “1668: The Year of the Animal in France” (Zone Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Peter Sahlins’s 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (Zone Books, 2017) is a captivating look at the role of animals in court and salon culture in the first decades of Louis XIV’s reign in France...
ListenLaura Kalba, “Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art” (Penn State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When you imagine the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, what colors do you see? Whatever comes to mind, Laura Kalba’s, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (Pe...
ListenBruno Chaouat, “Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism” (Liverpool University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“Is Theory Good for the Jews?” asks author Bruno Chaouat, professor of French at the University of Minnesota, in Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemiti...
ListenYoav Di-Capua, “No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonization” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Yoav Di-Capua‘s new book, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is narrative intellectual history at its best: a tale of friendship a...
ListenCatherine Soussloff, “Foucault on Painting” (U Minnesota Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Foucault on Painting (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Catherine Soussloff discusses an area of Foucault’s development that has remained largely overlooked: his engagement with painting. I...
ListenKate Skinner, “The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her book, The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Kate Skinner examines the history behind the failed project...
ListenLeah Bassel and Akwugo Emejulu, “Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain” (Policy Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the impact of austerity on minority women? How has this impacted on already long standing forms of social inequality across England, France and Scotland? These questions are the subject of ...
ListenKatelyn Knox, “Race on Display in Twentieth- and Twenty First-Century France” (Liverpool UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Katelyn Knox’s book, Race on Display in Twentieth- and Twenty First–Century France (Liverpool University Press, 2016) examines francophone literature, art, dance, music, and fashion, considering ho...
ListenKimberly A. Francis, “Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Pedagogue, composer, and conductor Nadia Boulanger was a central figure in Igor Stravinsky’s life during the middle part of his career, providing him with support, advice, and a discerning analytic...
ListenSandra Ott, “Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the West Pyrenees, 1940-1948” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the West Pyrenees, 1940-1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Sandra Ott, Associate Professor of Basque St...
ListenMehammed Mack, “Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture” (Fordham UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the recent past, anti-Muslim hate crimes and rhetoric have surged across America and Europe. Much of this public discourse revolves around questions of assimilation and where Muslim positions on...
ListenFareen Parvez, “Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India (Oxford University Press, 2017) by Fareen Parvez is a rich ethnographic analysis of Islamic Revival movements in France (Lyon) and India ...
ListenEric T. Jennings, “Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus from the French Caribbean” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean (Harvard University Press, 2018), Eric T. Jennings reveals the fascinating history of the Martinique Corridor, a pathway travelled b...
ListenRobert Darnton, “A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Five decades ago, a young scholar named Robert Darnton followed up on a footnote that took him to the archives of the “Typographical Society of Neuchatel”(S.T.N.) in Switzerland, not far from the F...
ListenTatyana V. Bakhmetyeva, “Mother of the Church” (Northern Illinois UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Mother of the Church: Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva explor...
ListenDavid Narrett, “Adventurism and Empire” (UNC Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762-1803 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), David Narrett explores the internationa...
ListenJean Beaman, “Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France” (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does it mean to be a citizen? Every country has its own legal codes that confer a set of rights on official members. But full citizenship is often more than what the law says. A better questio...
ListenRobert Foxcurran, “Songs Upon the Rivers” (Baraka Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The story of the American West as it is often told typically involves Spanish, British, and American Empires struggling with Indigenous people for control of the vast territory lands and riches fro...
ListenMarlene Daut, “Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism” (Palgrave, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave, 2017), Marlene Daut helps to resurrect the life and writings of one of Haiti’s most influential thinkers. Baron de Vastey is...
ListenClaire Eldridge, “From Empire to Exile” (Manchester UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The French-Algerian War that erupted in 1954 ended with the emergence of an independent Algeria in 1962, but it was not until decades later that a broader French public turned its attention with vi...
ListenJason Herbeck, “Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean” (Liverpool UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What do gingerbread houses in Haiti teach us about the construction of identity in the French Caribbean? How do hurricanes and earthquakes reveal the connections between the tangible built environm...
ListenLeslie Kealhofer-Kemp, “Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France” (Liverpool UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Connections between France and North Africa have long been shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and economics. This intercultural relationship has also been mediated through the arts. In Muslim Wome...
ListenWolfgang Seibel, “Persecution and Rescue: The Politics of the Final Solution in France, 1940-1944” (U Michigan Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his recent book, Persecution and Rescue: The Politics of the Final Solution in France, 1940-1944 (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Wolfgang Seibel explores the factors that shaped the Holoca...
ListenSarah Fishman, “From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her latest book, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France (Oxford University Press, 2017), Sarah Fishman offers reader a social history of French families in...
ListenDavid Hopkin, “Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The author of this book, David Hopkin, is Professor of European Social History at Hertford College, Oxford. He is also my brother. However, I’m not featuring him on New Books in Folklore because of...
ListenJulien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, “Minitel: Welcome to the Internet” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When discussing Internet history, many within the United States believe the creation myth of an Internet born in Silicon Valley. But aspects of the Internet that we use for shopping, financial tran...
ListenMichel Leiris, “Phantom Africa” (Seagull Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Between 1931 and 1933, French writer Michel Leiris participated in a state-sponsored expedition to document the cultural practices of people in west and east Africa. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti empl...
ListenChristopher Church, “Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean” (U. Nebraska Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Hurricanes, fires, a volcano eruption: disasters are political, as Christopher Church argues. His new book, Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean (University of Ne...
ListenKathryn Brown. ed., “Perspectives on Degas” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Edgar Degas died in the fall of 1917. Marking this 100th anniversary, Kathryn Brown‘s edited collection, Perspectives on Degas (Routledge, 2016) brings together a range of authors and methodologies...
ListenStuart Elden, “Foucault: The Birth of Power” (Polity Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How did Foucault become a public, political intellectual? In Foucault: The Birth of Power (Polity Press, 2017), Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwic...
ListenRegine Jean-Charles, “Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary” (OSU Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Regine Jean-Charles’ Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014) foregrounds black women as speaking subjects in narrating ...
ListenAndrew Smith, “Terror and Terroir: The Winegrowers of the Languedoc and Modern France” (Manchester University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Andrew Smith‘s Terror and Terroir: The Winegrowers of the Languedoc and Modern France (Manchester University Press, 2016) is a political history of wine radicalism. Focused on the producers rather ...
ListenPaige Bowers, “The General’s Niece: The Little-Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France” (Chicago Review Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When Charles de Gaulle issued his famous call in June 1940 for the French people to continue fighting Nazi Germany, among those within Occupied France who took up the cause was his young niece Gene...
ListenT. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, “Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars (SUNY Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When Dorothy Sterling wrote her book about nineteenth-century black women in America, she stated in the introduction that the book was not a definitive history of black women but a sourcebook to le...
ListenLori Marso, “Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter” (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lori Marso’s new book, Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter (Duke University Press, 2017), delves into Simone de Beauvoir’s political thought, feminism, and activism. The text is a fasc...
ListenMaurice Samuels, “The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews” (U. Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Right To Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Maurice Samuels, Betty Jane Anylan Professor of French and director of the Yale Program for the Stu...
ListenMatthew Gillis, “Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the popular imagination, heresy belongs to the Christian Middle Ages in much the way that the Crusades or courtly culture do. Non-specialists in the medieval field may assume that the problem of...
ListenAlexia Yates, “Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siecle Capital” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What comes to mind when you think of Paris in the nineteenth century? For me, its revolutionary politics, the circulation of increasing numbers of people and goods, a range of spectacular cultural ...
ListenAllan H. Pasco, “Balzac, Literary Sociologist” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Balzac, Literary Sociologist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Allan H. Pasco explores the talents of the writer whose reputation has been primarily based on his extraordinary gift to compose captivat...
ListenBruno Perreau, “Queer Theory: The French Response” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
At once wonderfully clear and bursting with complexity, the title of Bruno Perreau‘s book, Queer Theory: The French Response (Stanford University Press, 2016) is one of my favorites of the past sev...
ListenRebecca Scales, “Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What did sound mean to French people as radio and other listening technologies began to proliferate in the early twentieth century? What was the nature and significance of French auditory culture i...
ListenMichaela DeSoucey, “Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A heritage food in France, and a high-priced obscurity in the United States. But in both countries, foie gras, the specially fattened liver of a duck or goose, has the power to stir a remarkable ar...
ListenSarah Hammerschlag, “Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016), Sarah Hammerschlag, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature at the University o...
ListenMark Braude, “Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle” (Simon and Schuster, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mark Braude’s Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle (Simon and Schuster, 2016) tells the captivating story of the rise of Monte Carlo as Europe’s most famous casino-resort from...
ListenAlexandra Deutsch, “A Woman of Two Worlds: Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte” (Maryland Historical Society, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte was a celebrity in 19th century America thanks in no small measure to her brief marriage to Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest brother Jerome. In A Woman of Two Worlds: Eli...
ListenDavid Shafer, “Antonin Artaud” (Reaktion/U Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“Artaud lived with his neck placed firmly in the noose.” -Bauhaus* David Shafer’s new biography, Antonin Artaud (Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press, 2016), situates the life of th...
ListenJennifer L. Palmer, “Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic” (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jennifer Palmer’s new book, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), uses the stories of two extraordinary families as the point of depart...
ListenKathryn Kleppinger, “Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and Media in France, 1983-2013” (Liverpool UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kathryn Kleppinger’s Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983-2013 (Liverpool University Press, 2015) examines the “paradox of ethnic minority writing” in the work o...
ListenCaroline Ford, “Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Caroline Ford’s Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France (Harvard University Press, 2016) explores the roots of French environmental consciousness in the eighteenth and nine...
ListenEmile Chabal, “A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Emile Chabal’s A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an in-depth analysis of the languages and preoccupations of French civi...
ListenKieko Matteson, “Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kieko Matteson’s Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an impressive study of the economic and political vitality o...
ListenEthan Katz, “The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015), Ethan Katz examines and interrogates Jewish-Muslim relations from 1914 to the present. ...
ListenJason Berry, "City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Jason Berry delivers a history of New Orleans at its tricentennial. Beyond its ancient ...
ListenJeremy Ahearne, “Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How did two right wing presidents use culture to govern France? In Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Jeremy Ahearne, a Professor of French Stu...
ListenOliver Gloag, "Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Albert Camus, one of the most famous French philosophers and novelists, has a diverse fan base. British alternative rockers The Cure sang about The Stranger in their first big hit, “Killing an Arab...
ListenKristin Ross, “Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune” (Verso, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
One hundred and forty-five years ago this week, the French state massacred thousands of its own people during the semaine sanglante (bloody week) of the Paris Commune. Kristin Ross’ Communal Luxury...
ListenRobin Mitchell, "Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France" (U Georgia Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The preface to Robin Mitchell's new book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020) moves me. In it, the author tells the stor...
ListenNicole Rudolph, “At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort” (Berghahn Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nicole Rudolph‘s At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort (Berghahn Books, 2015) contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the three decades after 1945 known as...
ListenS. Burrows and G. Roe, "Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of 18th-Century Studies" (Liverpool UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of 18th-Century Studies (Liverpool UP, 2020) explores how a set of inter-related digital projects are transforming our vision of ...
ListenMichael Broer, “Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny” (Pegasus, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most biographers writing about the life and achievements of Napoleon Bonaparte have focused on his dramatic personality or his military campaigns. In Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny (Pegasus, 2015) th...
ListenMichael Goebel, “Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Michael Goebel‘s Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015) thinks globally while focusing on the local, everyday histories...
ListenAllison Drew, “We Are No Longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria” (Manchester UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Allison Drew‘s We Are No Longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria (Manchester University Press, 2014) traces the long, complex history of communism in Algeria throughout the colonial period...
ListenDaniella Doron, “Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation” (Indiana UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Indiana UP, 2015), Daniella Doron, Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University, looks at the post-W...
ListenRobert Priest, “The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Robert Priest‘s The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a fascinating book about another fascinating book: Erne...
ListenDomna Stanton, “The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing” (Ashgate, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Domna Stanton‘s latest book The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing (Ashgate, 2014) is a series of six case studies with important literary, historical, and theoret...
ListenSarah Maza, “Violette Noziere: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris” (U. of California Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On August 21, 1933, the teenaged Violette Noziere attempted to kill both her parents. At first, seemingly so clearcut, the case ultimately came to be characterized by a “troubling ambiguity” that ...
ListenMaud S. Mandel, “Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict” (Princeton University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014), Maud S. Mandel, Dean of the College at Brown University, challenges the view that rising anti-Semitism in Fr...
ListenYarimar Bonilla, “Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As overseas departments of France, the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are frequently described as anomalies within the postcolonial Caribbean. Yet in reality, as Yarimar Bonilla argues in her...
ListenSarah Abrevaya Stein, “Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria” (U of Chicago, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago, 2014), Sarah Abrevaya Stein, professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA, takes a new perspe...
ListenJerome Bourdon, “Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle” (Presses des Mines, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jerome de Bourdon‘s Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle (Presses des Mines, 2014) is a revised version of a book that first appeared in 1990. This edition has been revamped, and includes a new...
ListenAm Johal, “Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene” (Atropos Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The French philosopher Alain Badiou is not best known for his engagement with ecological matters per se. Badiou’s insights regarding being, truth, and political militancy are, however, highly relev...
ListenAnita Guerrini, “The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Anita Guerrini‘s wonderful new book explores Paris as a site of anatomy, dissection, and science during the reign of Louis XIV between 1643-1715. The journey begins with readers accompanying a dead...
ListenMalick Ghachem’s “The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Malick Ghachem‘s recent book The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012) takes a long look at Haiti’s colonial history on the legal questions around slavery. In par...
ListenJonathyne Briggs, “Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“Pop pop pop pop musik” -M Jonathyne Briggs‘ new book, Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980(Oxford University Press, 2015) makes music the historical focus ...
ListenKimberly Arkin, “Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoulson, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judai...
ListenRichard C. Keller, “Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In August 2003, a heat wave in France killed close to 15,000 people, the majority of whom were over 75. Prominent among the dead were a group of victims known as “the forgotten,” people who died al...
ListenDana Simmons, “Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dana Simmons‘s marvelous and thoughtful new book takes on a question that many of us likely take for granted: “What is a need; what is a want, a desire, a luxury?” Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and...
ListenTabetha Ewing, “Rumor, Diplomacy, and War in Enlightenment Paris” (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Tabetha Ewing‘s Rumor, Diplomacy and War in Enlightenment Paris (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014) is all about the on dit, the word on the street that everyday Parisians might ...
ListenLisa Moses Leff, “The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lisa Moses Leff joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss her new book, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015). In t...
ListenEric Reed, “Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Tour de France is happening right now! The 2015 edition started on July 4th and will continue until July 26th. I’m excited to be able to share this interview with Eric Reed about his new book, ...
ListenGary Wilder, “Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Gary Wilder‘s new book, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) builds upon the work he began in The French Imperial Nation State: Negritu...
ListenFelicia McCarren, “French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Felicia McCarren‘s latest book, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop (Oxford University Press, 2013) explores the fascinating evolution of this urban dance form in the French context. ...
ListenDavid Meren, “With Friends Like These: Entangled Nationalisms in the Canada-Quebec-France Triangle, 1944-1970” (University of British Columbia Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1967, French President Charles de Gaulle cried out “Vive le Quebec libre!” from the balcony of Montreal’s City Hall. The controversial moment became a myth almost instantly. The four words De Ga...
ListenHugo Frey, “Nationalism and the Cinema in France” (Berghahn Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Hugo Frey‘s new book, Nationalism and the Cinema in France: Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945-1995 (Berghahn Books, 2014) distinguishes between a national cinema (films made in France) an...
ListenTracy Leavelle, “The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America” (U Penn Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Studies of Christian missions can easily fall into two different traps: either one-sidedly presenting the missionaries as heroes saving benighted savages or portraying them as villains carrying out...
ListenNicolas Kenny, “The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation” (U of Toronto Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nicolas Kenny‘s new book, The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation (University of Toronto Press, 2014) explores the sensory histories and urban development of Montreal and Brussels...
ListenCarol E. Harrison, “Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith” (Cornell UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Since the political left and right first arose during the French Revolution, Catholics have been categorized as either conservatives or liberals, and most Catholics of the French nineteenth century...
ListenMichael Kwass, “Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground” (Harvard University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Michael Kwass‘s new book, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground is much more than an exciting biography of the notorious eighteenth-century smuggler whose name remains le...
ListenStephen L. Harp, “Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France” (LSU Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the decades after the Second World War, France became the foremost nudist site in Europe. Stephen L. Harp‘s new book, Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France (Louis...
ListenErnest P. Young, “Ecclesiastical Colony: China’s Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In theory, Christian missionaries plan only on working in a country until an indigenous leadership can take over management of the church. Theory is one thing, but practice is quite another, as Dr....
ListenCathy L. Schneider, “Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Cathy L. Schneider is the author of Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is associate professor in the School of Internation...
ListenKiran Klaus Patel, "Project Europe: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Project Europe made waves when it was published in German in 2018 (CH Beck) and was soon translated into English as Project Europe: A History (Cambridge UP, 2020). A clue to its crossover appeal ca...
ListenJohn Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret...
ListenNimisha Barton, "Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On today’s New Books in History, we sit down with Dr. Nimisha Barton to discuss her new book, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France (Cornell University Press, 2...
ListenKathrin Yacavone, “Benjamin, Barthes, and the Singularity of Photography” (Bloomsbury, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kathrin Yacavone‘s Benjamin, Barthes, and the Singularity of Photography (Bloomsbury, 2013) is an engaging study that explores connections between two of the most significant thinkers of the twenti...
ListenDaniel Lee, “Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Daniel Lee‘s new book, Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942 (Oxford University Press, 2014) is highly compelling in its breadth, depth of research, and anal...
ListenRebecca Rogers, “A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the early 1830s, the French school teacher Eugénie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around educational practices there, insisting that not only wer...
ListenJohn Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid nineteenth century. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Scie...
ListenJohn Protevi, “Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up new ways to conceptualize and ask questions of o...
ListenAlice Conklin, “In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950” (Cornell UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Host Jonathan Judaken and author Alice Conklin discuss the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French imperialism and European fascism, as well as thi...
ListenNoah Shusterman, “The French Revolution: Faith, Desire, and Politics” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
This year marks the 225th anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution. You don’t have to be a historian to know and appreciate how significant that revolution is to our understanding of Fr...
ListenMary Terrall, “Catching Nature in the Act” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mary Terrall‘s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the eighteenth-century francophone world. Catching Nat...
ListenClare Haru Crowston, “Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Anyone who’s been paying attention to the flurry around the French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century (Le Capital au XXIe siecle) knows how a la mode the econom...
ListenMiranda Spieler, “Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana” (Harvard University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard University Press, 2012), historian Miranda Spieler tells of the transformation of a slave plantation colony into a destination for metr...
ListenLeona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeffrey H. Jackson, eds. “The Thinking Space” (Ashgate, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Believe it or not, the origins of this podcast and the entire New Books Network can be traced to a conversation I had in a cafein Ann Arbor, Michigan (Sweetwaters in Kerrytown, as it happens) in 20...
ListenEllen J. Amster, “Medicine and the Saints” (University of Texas Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the interplay between the physical human body and the body politic? This question is at the heart of Ellen J. Amster‘s Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in...
ListenColette Colligan, “A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris 1890-1960” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From the end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Paris was a center for the publication of numerous English-language books, including many of a sexually explicit, pornogr...
ListenCamille Robcis, “The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France” (Cornell UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Only in a place like France do the texts and theories of towering intellectual figures like Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan come up in public and political discussions of family policy and la...
ListenKathleen Wellman, “Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Queens and royal mistresses of the Renaissance were the Hollywood celebrities of their time, which explains their enduring magnetism for writers, artists, and the public. Historians and scholars, h...
ListenSandrine Sanos, “The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France” (Stanford University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sandrine Sanos‘s new book, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford University Press, 2013), examines the central roles that gender, sexual...
ListenJennifer Sessions, “By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria” (Cornell UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Early modern European imperialism is really pretty easy to understand. Spain, Portugal, England, France, Russia and the rest were ruled by people whose business was war. They were conquerors, and c...
ListenLindsay Krasnoff, “The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010” (Lexington Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1967, an official of the French basketball federation lamented the team’s poor finish at that year’s European Championships in Finland. The French team finished sixth in their group of eight, an...
ListenEric Jennings, “Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonia...
ListenGayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite, “Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France” (LSU Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The stories of individual lives are endlessly complex, weaving together the contemporary events, the surrounding culture, and incorporating random factual odds and ends. This is one of the challeng...
ListenBrian Sandberg, “Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Brian Sandberg‘s Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) significantly revises our understanding of early modern military cu...
ListenElizabeth Foster, “Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940” (Stanford University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How did French colonial administrators, missionaries, and different groups of Africans interact with one another in colonial Senegal? In her new book, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colon...
ListenMary Louise Roberts, “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Tracking soldiers from the villages and towns of Northern France, to the “Silver Foxhole” of Paris, to tribunals that convicted a disproportionate number of African-American soldiers of rape, Mary ...
ListenJohn E. Joseph, “Saussure” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachro...
ListenLisa Chaney, “Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As a reader, biography offers not simply an opportunity to read about the life of another, but also an invitation to ponder the choices that are available in life, the choices that comprise a life....
ListenE. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in ...
ListenLaurent Dubois, “Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There are few moments in recent sports history as riveting, perplexing, and widely debated as Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt to Marco Materazzi in the final match of the 2006 World Cup. Think of your ...
ListenPaul Friedland, “Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment In France” (Oxford University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity–perhaps stashed somewhere in between idealized barri...
ListenNancy Hargrove, “T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year” (University of Florida Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especially true with the modernists, in particular T.S. ...
ListenCarolina Armenteros, “The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854” (Cornell UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “The Enlightenment” in which we read all the thinkers of, well, “The Enlightenment.” I came to understand that they were the “good guys” of Wester...
ListenCarolyn Burke, “No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf” (Knopf, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s. And yet, so of...
ListenAndrew Curran, “The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history o...
ListenJeffrey H. Jackson, “Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the late 19th century, French sociologist Emile Durkheim warned the world about spreading “normlessness” (anomie). He claimed that modern society, and particularly life in concentrated urban-ind...
ListenRuth Harris, “Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century” (Henry Holt, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill-fitting glove, and charges of racism. I watched every ...
ListenRichard Fogarty, “Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The thing about empire building is that when you’re done building one, you’ve got to figure out what to do with it. This generally involves the “extraction of resources.” We tend to think of this i...
ListenRonen Steinberg, "The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How did the "Reign of Terror" end? In his new book, The Afterlives of Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell University Press, 2019), Ronen Steinberg expl...
ListenNiklas Frykman, "The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The 1790s were a decade of turmoil and strife across the West. With the French Revolution, a new era of wars began that invoked the language of equal rights. In The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age o...
ListenDónal Hassett, "Mobilizing Memory: The Great War and the Language of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918-1939" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dónal Hassett’s Mobilizing Memory: The Great War and the Language of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918-1939 (Oxford UP, 2019) is at once a history of colonialism and of the “Great War”. Considerin...
ListenJudith G. Coffin, "Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When Judith G. Coffin discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from Beauvoir's international readers, it inspired Coffin to explore the intimate bond betwee...
ListenJulie Hardwick, "Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Young women and men sought out each other’s company in the workshops, cabarets, and streets of Old Regime Lyon, and evidence of these relationships lingers in documents and material objects conserv...
ListenPatrick Ffrench, "Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics (Bloomsbury) is a book by Patrick Ffrench, Professor of French at Kings College. It is a comprehensively researched and finely argued book that ...
ListenPernille Røge, "Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa c. 1750-1802" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802 (Cambridge UP, 2020), Dr. Pernille Røge charts the confluence and reciprocal impacts of i...
ListenRachel Mesch, "Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press), Rachel Mesch reads the biographies and work of three writers who did not conform to the gender norm...
ListenDan Edelstein, "On the Spirit of Rights" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exact...
ListenWilliam G. Pooley, "Body and Tradition in 19th-Century France: Félix Arnaudin and the Moorlands of Gascony, 1870-1914" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The moorlands of Gascony are often considered one of the most dramatic examples of top-down rural modernization in nineteenth-century Europe. From an area of open moors, they were transformed in on...
ListenAnnette Joseph-Gabriel, "Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire" (Illinois UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
‘Where were the women?’ was the big question that led Annette Joseph-Gabriel to her new book, Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (University of Ill...
ListenPatrice Gueniffey, "Napoleon and de Gaulle: Heroes and History" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
One of France’s most famous historians compares and contrasts the two most famous French exemplars of political and military leadership of the past two-hundred and fifty years to make the case that...
ListenGreg Beckett, "There is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In today’s episode, I talk with Dr. Greg Beckett, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western University, about his richly grounded book There is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au...
ListenLinda Goddard, "Savage Tales: The Writings of Paul Gauguin" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Savage Tales: The Writings of Paul Gauguin (Yale University Press, 2019), Linda Goddard investigates the role that Paul Gauguin’s writings played in his artistic practice and in his negotiation ...
ListenSophie White, "Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal tria...
ListenLaurie M. Wood, "Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Historians have long treated the Atlantic and Indian Ocean routes of early modern French empire separately. But, early modern people understood France as a bi-oceanic empire, connected by vast but ...
ListenRichard Carswell, "The Fall of France in the Second World War: History and Memory" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
This fascinating book by Richard Carswell looks at how the fall of France in the Second World War has been recorded by historians and remembered within French society. The Fall of France in the Sec...
ListenWhy Did the Allies Win World War One? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Great War was perhaps the greatest single upheaval of the 20th century. While World War II saw more lives lost, in terms of the shock to European/Western civilization, the Great War was a more ...
ListenBrian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...
ListenKevin Duong, "The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kevin Duong, a political theorist in the Politics Department at the University of Virginia, has written a fascinating analysis of the way that violence has been used, in a sense, to create or promo...
ListenKory Olson, "The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris" (Liverpool UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When is the last time you looked at/consulted a paper map? Perhaps you have one hanging on a wall at home or work, framed or not. Or maybe you have some old road maps in a stack somewhere, as I do,...
ListenDavid A. Bateman, "Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the US, the UK, and France" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
David A. Bateman’s fascinating new book opens with a puzzle. In 19th-century America, why was mass democratization – abolishing property and tax qualifications – accompanied by the mass disenfranch...
ListenLaurence Monnais, "The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Situated at the crossroads between the history of colonialism, of modern Southeast Asia, and of medical pluralism, this history of medicine and health traces the life of pharmaceuticals in Vietnam ...
ListenLeslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...
ListenGreat Books: Melissa Schwartzberg on Rousseau's "The Social Contract" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The opening sentence of 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Roussau's The Social Contract poses a central question for all of us. Why do we liv...
ListenDavid Lebovitz, "Drinking French" (Ten Speed Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Few experiences can top sitting in a Parisian cafe and watching the world go by, a glass of something at your elbow. But if you've ever gone inside the cafe and confronted the battalion of beautifu...
ListenTom Chaffin, "Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship that Helped Forge Two Nations" (St. Martins, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Of the many thousands who participated in the American and French revolutions in the late 18th century, only a handful played roles in both events. Among that select number were Thomas Jefferson an...
ListenGreat Books: Denis Hollier on Lévi-Strauss' "Tristes Tropiques" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Claude Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques is one of the great books of the 20th century: intellectually bold, morally capacious, and it aims to understand nothing less than the elemental workings of t...
ListenAlexander Mikaberidze, "The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Austerlitz, Wagram, Borodino, Trafalgar, Leipzig, Waterloo: these are the battles most closely associated with the Napoleonic Wars. But how did this period of nearly continuous warfare affect the w...
ListenArthur Asseraf, "Electric News in Colonial Algeria" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Arthur Asseraf’s Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the workings of the “news ecosystem” in Algeria from the 1880s to the beginning of the Second World War. ...
ListenMatt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...
ListenThe Origins of World War One from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Who or what originated and/or caused the Great War from breaking out in July 1914? Was it Serbia with its expansionist and aggressive designs on Austria-Hungary? Was it Austria-Hungary itself, unne...
ListenJohn Hardman, "Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new a...
ListenJeffrey James Byrne, "Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order" (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his brilliant, category-smashing book, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford University Press, 2016), Jeffrey James Byrne places Algeria at the center o...
ListenPhillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...
ListenTodd Shepard, "Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979" (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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...
ListenK. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 work...
ListenGreat Books: Catherine Stimpson on de Beauvior's "The Second Sex" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
"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 ...
ListenJennifer Cazenave, "An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah" (SUNY Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jennifer Cazenave’s An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (SUNY Press, 2019) is a fascinating analysis of the 220 hours of outtakes edited out of the final ni...
ListenJessica Lynne Pearson, "The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 ...
ListenSarah Wobick-Segev, "Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in 20th-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 liv...
ListenAndrew Israel Ross, "Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris" (Temple UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 ...
ListenGillian Glaes, "African Political Activism in Postcolonial France: State Surveillance and Social Welfare" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 1...
ListenThe Treaty of Versailles One Hundred Years On from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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...
ListenCéline Carayon, "Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 ...
ListenAlberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 sh...
ListenCaroline Weber, “Proust’s Duchess” (Knopf, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“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 conve...
ListenMichael G. Vann, "The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A funny thing happened to historian Michael Vann* on the way to his PhD thesis. While he was doing his research on French colonialism and the urbanist project in Hanoi, he came across an intriguing...
ListenClaire Edington, "Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 worke...
ListenAnnabel L. Kim, "Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions" (Ohio State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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...
ListenKathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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...
ListenJulia Nicholls, "Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, 1871-1885" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 ...
ListenJ. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 nec...
ListenCatherine Clark, "Paris and the Cliché of History: The City in Photographs, 1860-1970" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 H...
ListenMichitake Aso, "Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 Vietn...
ListenCécile Vidal, "Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 ...
ListenKate Kirkpatrick, "Becoming Beauvoir: A Life" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 th...
ListenKatie Jarvis, "Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The king’s guards became increasingly nervous as they watched nearly 7,000 individuals march on Versailles on October 5, 1789. The crowd approaching the king’s chateau was overwhelmingly composed o...
ListenMark Braude, "The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba from Empire to Exile" (Penguin Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
I must’ve been a kid when I first heard the palindrome “Able I was ere I saw Elba”. Napoleon didn’t mean a lot to me at the time. “Elba” meant even less. Decades later, I had learned a little more ...
ListenSusan Jaques, "The Caesar of Paris: Napoleon Bonaparte, Rome, and the Artistic Obsession That Shaped An Empire" (Pegasus Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her book, The Caesar of Paris: Napoleon Bonaparte, Rome, and the Artistic Obsession That Shaped An Empire (Pegasus Books, 2018), Susan Jaques offers up a richly detailed and researched account ...
ListenEmma Kuby, "Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps After 1945" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Emma Kuby’s new book, Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps After 1945 (Cornell UP, 2019) traces the fascinating history of the International ...
ListenLisa Greenwald, "Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement" (U Nebraska Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
May ’68 marked a watershed moment in French society, culture, and political life. The feminist movement was no exception. Women took to the streets and meeting halls around the country, challenging...
ListenStephen Alan Bourque, "Beyond the Beach: The Allied War Against France" (Naval Institute Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Did the Allied bombing plan for the liberation of France follow a carefully orchestrated plan, or was it executed on an ad-hoc basis with little concern or regard for collateral damage? How did the...
ListenErin-Marie Legacey, "Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780-1830" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780-1830 (Cornell University Press, 2019), Dr. Erin-Marie Legacey, Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech U...
ListenDavid Stenner, "Globalizing Morocco: Transnational Activism and the Postcolonial State" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The story of Morocco’s independence struggle against France and Spain is a complicated one. Because it occurred around the same time of the long-running war for independence in Algeria, it has rece...
ListenStijn Vanheule, Derek Hook and Calum Neill, "Reading Lacan’s Écrits" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lacan published his Écrits in 1966, a compilation of his written work up to that middle period in his teaching. Notoriously difficult to read, the editors of the book we’re discussing today describ...
ListenDonald Reid, "Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968-1981" (Verso Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the summer of 1973, Donald Reid was an undergraduate student who had traveled to France for the first time to work on his Honors thesis in History. It was the “summer of Lip”. Don’s new book, Op...
ListenJoan Wallach Scott, "Sex and Secularism" (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Joan Wallach Scott’s contributions to the history of women and gender, and to feminist theory, will be familiar to listeners across multiple disciplines. Her latest book, Sex and Secularism (Prince...
ListenStacy Fahrenthold, "Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her debut book, Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2019), Stacy Fahrenthold sheds a timely light o...
ListenDavid Green, "The Hundred Years War: A People’s History" (Yale UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The year 1453 marked the end of an intermittent yet seemingly endless series of wars between the Kingdom of France and the Kingdom of England that, some four hundred years later, was dubbed the Hun...
ListenThomas Dodman, "What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Feelings have a history and nostalgia has its own. In What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion(University of Chicago Press, 2018) Thomas Dodman explores the history of nost...
ListenFrancesca Trivellato, "The Promise and Peril of Credit" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange had been invented by Jews. In The Promise and P...
ListenCathal J. Nolan, "The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, To...
ListenJeremy Black, "The World at War, 1914-1945" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian in the Anglo-phone world, ...
ListenMarixa Lasso, "Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Many of our presumptions about the Panama Canal Zone are wrong; it was not carved out of uninhabited jungle, the creation of Lake Gatún did not flood towns and force them to move, people living in ...
ListenHarold J. Cook, "The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Harold J. Cook talks about the travels and trials of the young Descartes, a man who spent as much time traveling and fighting as he did studying philosophy. Cook is John F. Nickoll Professor of His...
ListenRené Weis, "The Real Traviata: The Song of Marie Duplessis" (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Though she died in 1847 at a young age, Marie Duplessis inspired one of the greatest operas ever composed. In The Real Traviata: The Song of Marie Duplessis (Oxford University Press, 2015), René We...
ListenKathleen Keller, "Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa" (U Nebraska Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kathleen Keller’s new book, Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) is teeming with mysterious persons,...
ListenStéphane Henaut and Jeni Mitchell, "A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment" (The New Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From the cassoulet that won a war to the crêpe that doomed Napoleon, from the rebellions sparked by bread and salt to the new cuisines forged by empire, the history of France is intimately entwined...
ListenAnne Cheng, "Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program ...
ListenDiscussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...
ListenAndrew Sobanet, "Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his 1924 biography of Mahatma Gandhi, writer Romain Rolland embraced the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence and decried the “dictators of Moscow” and the “idolatrous ideology of the Revolution....
ListenGeraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of ...
ListenAlexandre Kojève, "Atheism," trans by Jeff Love (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Columbia University press has just released a new translation of a work by philosopher Alexandre Kojève, simply titled Atheism, translated by Professor Jeff Love. Considered to be one of the twenti...
ListenStefanos Geroulanos, "Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present" (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does it mean to do a “microhistory” of a concept? Stefanos Geroulanos pursues just such a project in the 22 chapters of Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present (Stanf...
ListenSun-Young Park, "Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We know quite a bit about the physical signatures of urban “modernity” foisted upon Paris by Baron Haussmann in the late nineteenth century — the broad boulevards, networked infrastructures, connec...
ListenPhilip Zelikow and Ernest May, "Suez Deconstructed: An Interactive Study in Crisis, War, and Peacemaking" (Brookings Institution, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Experiencing a major crisis from different viewpoints, step by step: the Suez crisis of 1956— one of the major crises of the 1950s offers a potential master class in statecraft and the politics of...
ListenBenoît Majerus, "From the Middle Ages to Today: Experiences and Representations of Madness in Paris" (Parigramme, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With Paris as the organizing locus of his new book, Du moyen âge à nos jours, expériences et représentations de la folie à Paris [From the Middle Ages to Today, Experiences and Representations of M...
ListenJulian Jackson, "De Gaulle" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Charles de Gaulle is one of the greatest figures of twentieth century history. If Sir Winston Churchill was (in the words of Harold Macmillan) the "greatest Englishman In history", then Charles de ...
ListenDenis Provencher, "Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations" (Liverpool UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sometimes a book can take inspiration from a (not so) simple map. At the end of his previous book, Queer French: Globalization, Language, and Sexual Citizenship (Routledge, 2007), Denis Provencher ...
ListenRichard Fogarty, “Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008) from 2008-11-03T03:51:27
The thing about empire building is that when you’re done building one, you’ve got to figure out what to do with it. This generally involves the “extraction of resources.” We tend to think of this i...
ListenRichard Fogarty, “Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008) from 2008-11-03T03:51:27
The thing about empire building is that when you’re done building one, you’ve got to figure out what to do with it. This generally involves the “extraction of resources.” We tend to think of this i...
Listen