New Books in French Studies
Episodes
Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Mediterranean
06 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For most of human history, the Mediterranean was home to a significant number of pastoralists, who herded livestock along seasonal migratory routes. T...
Siv B. Lie, "Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
04 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France (U Chicago Press, 2021) shows how relationships between racial identi...
Julia Elsky, "Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France" (Stanford UP, 2020)
28 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages ...
Eren Duzgun, "Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
28 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Western interpretations of the Ottoman age of reform and the Turkish Republic often evaluate these histories against an idealized, essentialized narra...
Garritt van Dyk, "Commerce, Food, and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England and France" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)
26 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Garritt van Dyk talks about national identity, food, and cooking in this conversation about Commerce, Food, and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Engla...
Mark McKinney, "Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics" (Leuven UP, 2021)
24 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Regarded as the “9th Art”, French bande desinée have a much longer history of serious socio-political engagement than American comics. Since the...
Noémie Ndiaye, "Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
21 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) shows how the early modern mass media of ...
On Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time"
15 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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,...
On Voltaire's "Candide"
14 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Many people made the European Enlightenment, but probably nobody better represents the movement’s spirit than the French writer and philosopher Volt...
Sandra Ott, "War, Judgment, And Memory In The Basque Borderlands, 1914-1945" (U Nevada Press, 2008)
07 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
During the first half of the twentieth century, the French Basque province of Xiberoa was a place of refuge, conflict, and foreign occupation. With th...
Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, "Wartime North Africa: A Documentary History, 1934-1950" (Stanford UP, 2022)
06 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein's book Wartime North Africa: A Documentary History, 1934-1950 (Stanford UP, 2022), the first-ever collection of ...
Jasmine Calver, "Anti-Fascism, Gender, and International Communism: The Comité Mondial Des Femmes Contre la Guerre et Le Fascisme, 1934-1941" (Routledge, 2022)
05 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Women played an essential role in the international struggle against fascism during the interwar period, though their work has been neglected in broad...
Cathy McClive, "The Art of Childbirth: A Seventeenth-Century Midwife's Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant" (Iter Press, 2022)
05 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Cathy McClive (Florida State University) offers the first full-length bilingual edition of an extraordinary treatise on childbirth written by a seve...
Burleigh Hendrickson, "Decolonizing 1968: Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar" (Cornell UP, 2022)
03 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Decolonizing 1968: Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar (Cornell UP, 2022) explores how activists in 1968 transformed university...
Jonathan R. Hunt, "The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam" (Stanford UP, 2022)
01 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford UP, 2022) reveals how a coalition of powerful and d...
Trevor Jackson, "Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
30 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of Europ...
On Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth"
29 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Jennifer Eun-Jung Row, "Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
28 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In a pathbreaking new book, today’s guest, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row, asks how delay and haste in early modern French theater subverts the temporality o...
Frans Camphuijsen, "Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Europe: Legal Practice and Communication in the Law Courts of Utrecht, York and Paris" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)
23 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Frans Camphuijsen explored records from the law courts of York, Paris, and Utrecht and used them as a base for Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Eu...
On Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish"
22 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We moderns often tell ourselves a story that goes something like this: The past was barbaric, especially when it came to punishing criminals or persec...
Ethnonationalism since 1973: A Discussion with Quinn Slobodian
17 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? And what is woke particularism? John and Elizabeth turn for answers to...
Mary Dunn, "Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds" (Princeton UP, 2022)
17 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In our age of biomedicine, society often treats sickness and disability as problems in need of solution. Phenomena of embodied difference, however, ha...
Michael A. Hunzeker, "Dying to Learn: Wartime Lessons from the Western Front" (Cornell UP, 2021)
16 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Dying to Learn: Wartime Lessons from the Western Front (Cornell UP, 2021), Michael Hunzeker develops a novel theory to explain how wartime milita...
On Aimé Césaire's "Discourse on Colonialism"
14 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Aimé Césaire was born in 1913 on the island of Martinique, which was colonized by the French in the 1600s. He received a scholarship to complete his...
William Doyle, "Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution" (Reaktion Books, 2022)
10 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The French Revolution facilitated the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after gaining power he knew that his first task was to end it. In this book Will...
Stephen G. Rabe, "The Lost Paratroopers of Normandy: A Story of Resistance, Courage, and Solidarity in a French Village" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
10 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The fateful days and weeks surrounding 6 June 1944 have been extensively documented in histories of the Second World War, but less attention has been ...
On Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "The Social Contract"
03 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that humans are born good, but society corrupts them. He was unimpressed with the fixation o...
4.5 The Best Error You Can Make: Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Baptiste Naudy on Claude McKay
03 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation b...
On Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex"
25 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 Se...
Tracy Adams and Christine Adams, "The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry" (Penn State UP, 2020)
21 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Kings throughout medieval and early modern Europe had extraconjugal sexual partners. Only in France, however, did the royal mistress become a quasi-in...
Thomas E. Burman et al., "The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650" (U California Press, 2022)
21 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650 (U California Press, 2022) presents an original and revisionist narrative of the developmen...
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, "The Abbe Gregoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism" (U California Press, 2021)
20 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this age of globalization, the eighteenth-century priest and abolitionist Henri Grégoire have often been called a man ahead of his time. An icon o...
Robyn D'Avignon, "A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa" (Duke UP, 2022)
10 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (Duke University Press, 2022), Robyn d’Avignon, Assistant Professor of...
Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla, "Africa's Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story" (Pluto Press, 2021)
07 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Colonialism persists in many African countries due to the continuation of imperial monetary policy. Africa's Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc St...
F. R. Scott’s Journal of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism
05 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Greg Marchildon interviews Graham Fraser who edited F. R. Scott’s journal that he kept while he was a member of the Royal Commission on Bilinguiism ...
Ian Macpherson McCulloch, "John Bradstreet's Raid 1758: A Riverine Operation in the French and Indian War" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)
05 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A year after John Bradstreet’s raid of 1758—the first and largest British-American riverine raid mounted during the Seven Years’ War (known in N...
Christopher Goscha, "The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam" (Princeton UP, 2022)
03 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Vietnamese victory over the French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which ended almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina, is one of t...
Emily Joan Ward, "Royal Childhood and Child Kingship: Boy Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, c. 1050–1262" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
30 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Royal Childhood and Child Kingship: Boy Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, c. 1050–1262 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) refines adu...
On Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables"
27 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Over 150 years later, Les Miserables is a story that still resonates with readers and audiences around the world. The story highlighted the unjust soc...
Charles Devellenes, "Positive Atheism: Bayle, Meslier, D'Holbach, Diderot" (Edinburgh UP, 2021)
23 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Positive Atheism: Bayle, Meslier, d’Holbach, Diderot (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Dr. Charles Devellennes looks at the religious, social...
Thomas Dodman, "What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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, 2...
Olivier Zunz, "The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville" (Princeton UP, 2022)
21 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1831, at the age of twenty-five, Alexis de Tocqueville made his fateful journey to America, where he observed the thrilling reality of a functionin...
Máté Rigó, "Capitalism in Chaos: How the Business Elites of Europe Prospered in the Era of the Great War" (Cornell UP, 2022)
20 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Capitalism in Chaos: How the Business Elites of Europe Prospered in the Era of the Great War (Cornell UP, 2022) explores an often-overlooked conseque...
On Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions"
15 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Jean-Jacques Rousseau led an interesting life. He was a philosopher, writer, and music composer in the 18th century. Rousseau believed that society ha...
Carl A. Brasseaux and Donald W. Davis, "Asian-Cajun Fusion: Shrimp from the Bay to the Bayou" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)
13 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Shrimp is easily America’s favorite seafood, but its very popularity is the wellspring of problems that threaten the shrimp industry’s existence. ...
Joanne Watson, "Empress Eugenie: A Footnote History, 1826-1920" (Grosvenor House, 2022)
12 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Empress Eugenie: A Footnote History, 1826-1920 (Grosvenor House, 2022) is the story of the glamorous French Empress who escaped from a vengeful mob i...
Elizabeth Andrews Bond, "The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France" (Cornell UP, 2021)
12 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Inspired by the reading and writing habits of citizens leading up to the French Revolution, The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in...
Josep M. Fradera, "The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires" (Princeton UP, 2018)
09 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How the legacy of monarchical empires shaped Britain, France, Spain, and the United States as they became liberal entities? Historians view the late e...
Paul A. Silverstein, "Postcolonial France: The Question of Race and the Future of the Republic" (Pluto Press, 2018)
02 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
France is a bellwether for the postcolonial anxieties and populist politics emerging across the world today. Postcolonial France: The Question of Rac...
On "Encyclopédie"
02 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
One of the earliest modern encyclopedias was printed in France in the 18th century. Unlike many encyclopedias that came before it, this text was writt...
Meighen McCrae, "Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War: The Supreme War Council and War Planning, 1917-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
01 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When the Germans requested an armistice in October 1918, it was a shock to the Allied political and military leadership. They had been expecting, and ...
Philipp Felsch, "The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960-1990" (Polity Press, 2021)
01 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
'Theory' - a magical glow has emanated from this word since the sixties. Theory was more than just a succession of ideas: it was an article of faith, ...
Amy Edwards, "Are We Rich Yet?: The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain" (U California Press, 2022)
31 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast, Amy Edwards, author of Are We Rich Yet?: The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain (U California Press, 2022), ...
The Future of the European Union: A Discussion with Luuk van Middelaar
30 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Brexit debate has been so all-consuming and filled with so much misinformation that many Brits and others can overlook some the challenges facing ...
Carolyn J. Eichner, "Feminism's Empire" (Cornell UP, 2022)
10 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Feminism's Empire (Cornell UP, 2022) investigates the complex relationships between imperialisms and feminisms in the late nineteenth century and dem...
Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, "Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie" (Companyédition PUF/Disclose, 2021)
08 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when you bring together an important collection of previously secret archival documents dealing with France's nuclear detonations in the ...
Itay Lotem, "The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)
05 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), Itay Lotem explores the remembering of empire i...
Nina Rattner Gelbart, "Minerva's French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France" (Yale UP, 2021)
04 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France (Yale University Press, 2021), Nina Gelbart, Professor of History and Anita ...
Emily O. Wittman, "Interwar Itineraries: Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing" (Amherst College Press, 2022)
03 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How people traveled, and how people wrote about travel, changed in the interwar years. Novel technologies eased travel conditions, breeding new iterat...
On Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days"
02 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 da...
Michael K. Beauchamp, "Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815" (LSU Press, 2021)
27 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
M. K. Beauchamp's Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815 (LSU Press, 2021) examines the...
Skye Cleary, "How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment" (St. Martin's Press, 2022)
27 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Skye C. Cleary is a philosopher, writer and university teacher. In her new book How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment...
Christina B. Carroll, "The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, 1850–1900" (Cornell UP, 2022)
15 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, 1850–1900 (Cornell University Press, 2022), Dr. Christina Carroll highlights the connections between...
Karen Offen, "Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
14 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
While it is an overused cliché, France is indeed a land of contrasts, famous for its paradoxes. In French political history, the most startling may b...
Lilianne Milgrom, "L' Origine: The Secret Life of the World's Most Erotic Masterpiece" (Girl Friday Books, 2021)
15 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Lilianne Milgrom about L' Origine: The Secret Life of the World's Most Erotic Masterpiece (Girl Friday Books, 2021). In 1866, mav...
Geoffrey Kurtz, "Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social Democracy" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2014)
10 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Jean Jaurès was a towering intellectual and political leader of the democratic Left at the turn of the twentieth century, but he is little remembered...
Virginia Reinburg, "Storied Places: Pilgrim Shrines, Nature, and History in Early Modern France" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
10 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Virginia Reinburg about her book Storied Places: Pilgrim Shrines, Nature, and History in Early Modern France (Cambridge UP, 2019)...
Daniel Fairfax, "The Red Years of Cahiers Du Cinéma (1968-1973)" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)
03 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Com...
Paul Galvez, "Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting" (Yale UP, 2022)
02 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and ...
Ashley M. Williard, "Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
30 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Dr. Ashley M. Will...
Jacob Collins, "The Anthropological Turn: French Political Thought After 1968" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
26 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Jacob Collins's The Anthropological Turn: French Political Through After 1968 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) examines some of the most imp...
Adriana Alfaro Altamirano, "The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
19 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Within the Western tradition, it was the philosophers Henri Bergson and Max Scheler who laid out and explored the nonrational power of "intuition" at ...
Carolyn J. Eichner, "The Paris Commune: A Brief History" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
18 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Carolyn Eichner's new book, The Paris Commune: A Brief History (Rutgers University Press, 2022) was published on March 18th, the anniversary of the...
Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden, "From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2022)
11 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s copyright laws are predicated on the idea that music is intellectual property; a commodity that has value to its creator and to its publishe...
Piotr H. Kosicki, "Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and 'Revolution,' 1891-1956" (Yale UP, 2018)
09 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Poland in the 1940s and '50s, a new kind of Catholic intended to remake European social and political life--not with guns, but French philosophy. P...
Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022)Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022)
06 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Megan Brown details the surprising st...
Joan DeJean, "Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast" (Basic, 2022)
02 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1719, a ship named La Mutine (the mutinous woman), sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the Mississippi. It was loaded with urgentl...
Lisa Reilly, "The Invention of Norman Visual Culture: Art, Politics, and Dynastic Ambition" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
20 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Invention of Norman Visual Culture: Art, Politics, and Dynastic Ambition (Cambridge UP, 2020), Lisa Reilly establishes a new interpretive par...
Elisabeth Anderson, "Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State" (Princeton UP, 2021)
11 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The beginnings of the modern welfare state are often traced to the late nineteenth-century labor movement and to policymakers’ efforts to appeal to ...
Yveline Alexis, "Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
11 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte (Rutgers University Press, 2021), by Yveline Alexis is the first US study of the poli...
Alice Jardine, "At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
08 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva (Bloomsbury, 2020) is the first biography of Julia Kristeva--one of the most cel...
Louis K. Epstein, "The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France" (Boydell, 2021)
06 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Patronage has long been an important topic of study in musicology, but is much more likely to be one that specialists in medieval or renaissance music...
Nu-Anh Tran, "Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
01 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In popular understandings of the modern history of Vietnam we are familiar with Ho Chi Minh’s anti-imperialism, but we know much less about the anti...
Abigail Susik, "Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work" (Manchester UP, 2021)
31 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
According to the definition offered by Tate on the occasion of the exhibition Surrealism Without Borders, Surrealism “aims to revolutionise human e...
Elayne Oliphant, "The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris" (UChicago Press, 2021)
25 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
France, officially, is a secular nation. Yet Catholicism is undeniably a monumental presence, defining the temporal and spatial rhythms of Paris. At t...
Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, "All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State" (Oxford UP, 2022)
18 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State (Oxford UP, 2022) attempts to answer one of the most urgent questions of our time: what i...
Tessa Murphy, "The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
16 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Tessa Murphy traces how generations of Indigenou...
Daniel Chirot, "You Say You Want a Revolution?: Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences" (Princeton UP, 2020)
07 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Why have so many of the iconic revolutions of modern times ended in bloody tragedies? And what lessons can be drawn from these failures today, in a wo...
Eliza Jane Smith, "Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France" (Lexington Books, 2021)
04 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Eliza Jane Smith's Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France (Lexington Books, 2021) applies a sociolinguistic approach to the...
Sarah Farmer, "Rural Inventions: The French Countryside After 1945" (Oxford UP, 2020)
01 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah Farmer's Rural Inventions: The French Countryside After 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a history of national, regional, and local tra...
Peter Salmon, "An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida" (Verso, 2020)
25 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Who is Jacques Derrida? For some, he is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right,...
Sarah Shortall, "Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics" (Harvard UP, 2021)
21 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics (Harvard University Press, 2021), Sarah Shortall exam...
Patricia Tilburg, "Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919" (Oxford UP, 2019)
16 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Patricia Tilburg's Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919 (Oxford University Press, 2019) is at once a cu...
Stuart Elden, "The Early Foucault" (Polity Press, 2021)
11 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It was not until 1961 that Foucault published his first major book, History of Madness. He had already been working as an academic for a decade, teac...
Nathaniel L. Moir, "Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare" (Oxford UP, 2021)
08 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare (Oxford UP, 2021), Dr. Nathaniel L. Moir studies the thought of this overlo...
Micah Alpaugh, "Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
07 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As the old cliché goes, “there must have been something in the water.” A new book by historian Micah Alpaugh, Friends of Freedom: The Rise of So...
Marco Wyss, "Postcolonial Security: Britain, France, and West Africa's Cold War" (Oxford UP, 2021)
07 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In light of the discrepancy between Britain’s and France’s postcolonial security roles in Africa, which seemed already determined half a decade af...
Susan Gilson Miller, "Years of Glory: Nelly Benatar and the Pursuit of Justice in Wartime North Africa" (Stanford UP, 2021)
03 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When France fell to Hitler's armies in June 1940, a flood of refugees fleeing Nazi terror quickly overwhelmed Europe's borders and spilled across the ...
Rita Koganzon, "Liberal States, Authoritarian Families: Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought" (Oxford UP, 2021)
03 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Rita Koganzon’s new book, Liberal States, Authoritarian Families: Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought (Oxford UP, 2021), examines the ...
Jeffrey H. Jackson, "Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis" (Algonquin Books, 2020)
28 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Want to read a fantastic book about art, love, politics, and resistance during the Second World War? Jeffrey H. Jackson's Paper Bullets: Two Artists...