New Books in French Studies
Episodes
Matthew Gillis, “Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais” (Oxford UP, 2017)
26 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 th...
Alexia Yates, “Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siecle Capital” (Harvard UP, 2015)
12 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
What comes to mind when you think of Paris in the nineteenth century? For me, its revolutionary politics, the circulation of increasing numbers of peo...
Allan H. Pasco, “Balzac, Literary Sociologist” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
08 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In Balzac, Literary Sociologist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Allan H. Pasco explores the talents of the writer whose reputation has been primarily base...
Bruno Perreau, “Queer Theory: The French Response” (Stanford UP, 2016)
02 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
At once wonderfully clear and bursting with complexity, the title of Bruno Perreau‘s book, Queer Theory: The French Response (Stanford University Pr...
Rebecca Scales, “Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
13 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
What did sound mean to French people as radio and other listening technologies began to proliferate in the early twentieth century? What was the natur...
Michaela DeSoucey, “Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food” (Princeton UP, 2016)
25 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Sarah Hammerschlag, “Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion” (Columbia UP, 2016)
20 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016), Sarah Hammerschlag, Associate Professor...
Mark Braude, “Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle” (Simon and Schuster, 2016)
09 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Alexandra Deutsch, “A Woman of Two Worlds: Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte” (Maryland Historical Society, 2016)
21 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte was a celebrity in 19th century America thanks in no small measure to her brief marriage to Napoleon Bonaparte’s young...
David Shafer, “Antonin Artaud” (Reaktion/U Chicago Press, 2016)
04 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“Artaud lived with his neck placed firmly in the noose.” -Bauhaus* David Shafer’s new biography, Antonin Artaud (Reaktion Books and the Univer...
Jennifer L. Palmer, “Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic” (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2016)
17 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Jennifer Palmer’s new book, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), uses the stories of ...
Kathryn Kleppinger, “Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and Media in France, 1983-2013” (Liverpool UP, 2015)
12 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Kathryn Kleppinger’s Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983-2013 (Liverpool University Press, 2015) examines the “...
Caroline Ford, “Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France” (Harvard UP, 2016)
12 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Caroline Ford’s Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France (Harvard University Press, 2016) explores the roots of French envir...
Emile Chabal, “A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
24 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Emile Chabal’s A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an in-depth analysis o...
Kieko Matteson, “Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
03 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Kieko Matteson’s Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an impressi...
Ethan Katz, “The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France” (Harvard UP, 2015)
28 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015), Ethan Katz examines and interrogates Jew...
Jeremy Ahearne, “Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
08 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
How did two right wing presidents use culture to govern France? In Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right (Palgrave Macmillan, 2...
Kristin Ross, “Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune” (Verso, 2015)
28 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Nicole Rudolph, “At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort” (Berghahn Books, 2015)
17 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
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 sch...
Michael Broer, “Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny” (Pegasus, 2015)
13 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Most biographers writing about the life and achievements of Napoleon Bonaparte have focused on his dramatic personality or his military campaigns. In ...
Michael Goebel, “Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
28 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Goebel‘s Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015) thinks globall...
Allison Drew, “We Are No Longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria” (Manchester UP, 2014)
31 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Allison Drew‘s We Are No Longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria (Manchester University Press, 2014) traces the long, complex history of co...
Daniella Doron, “Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation” (Indiana UP, 2015)
21 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Indiana UP, 2015), Daniella Doron, Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide St...
Robert Priest, “The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France” (Oxford UP, 2014)
10 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Priest‘s The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a fasc...
Domna Stanton, “The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing” (Ashgate, 2014)
28 Jan 2016
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Sarah Maza, “Violette Noziere: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris” (U. of California Press, 2012)
18 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Maud S. Mandel, “Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict” (Princeton University Press, 2014)
11 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014), Maud S. Mandel, Dean of the College at Brown University, chal...
Yarimar Bonilla, “Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
10 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
As overseas departments of France, the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are frequently described as anomalies within the postcolonial Caribbean. Y...
Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria” (U of Chicago, 2014)
07 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago, 2014), Sarah Abrevaya Stein, professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair i...
Jerome Bourdon, “Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle” (Presses des Mines, 2014)
17 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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. T...
Am Johal, “Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene” (Atropos Press, 2015)
08 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The French philosopher Alain Badiou is not best known for his engagement with ecological matters per se. Badiou’s insights regarding being, truth, a...
Anita Guerrini, “The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
04 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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. Th...
Malick Ghachem’s “The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
27 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Malick Ghachem‘s recent book The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012) takes a long look at Haiti’s colonial hi...
Jonathyne Briggs, “Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980” (Oxford UP, 2015)
30 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
“Pop pop pop pop musik” -M Jonathyne Briggs‘ new book, Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980(Oxford Univ...
Kimberly Arkin, “Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France” (Stanford UP, 2013)
24 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoul...
Richard C. Keller, “Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
23 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 victi...
Dana Simmons, “Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
15 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 d...
Tabetha Ewing, “Rumor, Diplomacy, and War in Enlightenment Paris” (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014)
31 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Tabetha Ewing‘s Rumor, Diplomacy and War in Enlightenment Paris (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014) is all about the on dit, the ...
Lisa Moses Leff, “The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2015)
03 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Eric Reed, “Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
17 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Gary Wilder, “Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World” (Duke UP, 2015)
28 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Gary Wilder‘s new book, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) builds upon the work he b...
Felicia McCarren, “French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop” (Oxford UP, 2013)
10 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Felicia McCarren‘s latest book, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop (Oxford University Press, 2013) explores the fascinating evolution...
David Meren, “With Friends Like These: Entangled Nationalisms in the Canada-Quebec-France Triangle, 1944-1970” (University of British Columbia Press, 2014)
05 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In 1967, French President Charles de Gaulle cried out “Vive le Quebec libre!” from the balcony of Montreal’s City Hall. The controversial moment...
Hugo Frey, “Nationalism and the Cinema in France” (Berghahn Books, 2014)
24 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Hugo Frey‘s new book, Nationalism and the Cinema in France: Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945-1995 (Berghahn Books, 2014) distinguishes be...
Tracy Leavelle, “The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America” (U Penn Press, 2014)
09 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Studies of Christian missions can easily fall into two different traps: either one-sidedly presenting the missionaries as heroes saving benighted sava...
Nicolas Kenny, “The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation” (U of Toronto Press, 2014)
04 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Nicolas Kenny‘s new book, The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation (University of Toronto Press, 2014) explores the sensory histori...
Carol E. Harrison, “Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith” (Cornell UP, 2014)
23 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Since the political left and right first arose during the French Revolution, Catholics have been categorized as either conservatives or liberals, and ...
Michael Kwass, “Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground” (Harvard University Press, 2014)
19 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Stephen L. Harp, “Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France” (LSU Press, 2014)
05 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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, Nudis...
Ernest P. Young, “Ecclesiastical Colony: China’s Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate” (Oxford UP, 2013)
08 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In theory, Christian missionaries plan only on working in a country until an indigenous leadership can take over management of the church. Theory is o...
Cathy L. Schneider, “Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)
08 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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 a...
John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014)
30 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reas...
Kathrin Yacavone, “Benjamin, Barthes, and the Singularity of Photography” (Bloomsbury, 2013)
29 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Kathrin Yacavone‘s Benjamin, Barthes, and the Singularity of Photography (Bloomsbury, 2013) is an engaging study that explores connections between t...
Daniel Lee, “Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942” (Oxford UP, 2014)
07 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Lee‘s new book, Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942 (Oxford University Press, 2014) is highly com...
Rebecca Rogers, “A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story” (Stanford UP, 2013)
02 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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 educat...
John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
05 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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 ninet...
John Protevi, “Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
22 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up n...
Melanie C. Hawthorne, "Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious Life of Gisele d'Estoc" (U Nebraska Press, 2014)
11 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
"Why write the biography of a nobody?" That is the question with which Melanie C. Hawthorne begins Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious ...
Alice Conklin, “In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950” (Cornell UP, 2013)
29 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Host Jonathan Judaken and author Alice Conklin discuss the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French ...
Noah Shusterman, “The French Revolution: Faith, Desire, and Politics” (Routledge, 2013)
14 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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 signific...
Mary Terrall, “Catching Nature in the Act” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
04 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Mary Terrall‘s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the e...
Clare Haru Crowston, “Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France”
29 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Anyone who’s been paying attention to the flurry around the French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century (Le Capi...
Miranda Spieler, “Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana” (Harvard University Press, 2012)
28 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard University Press, 2012), historian Miranda Spieler tells of the transformation of a slav...
Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeffrey H. Jackson, eds. “The Thinking Space” (Ashgate, 2013)
27 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Ellen J. Amster, “Medicine and the Saints” (University of Texas Press, 2013)
16 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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 Sain...
Colette Colligan, “A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris 1890-1960” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014)
10 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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,...
Camille Robcis, “The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France” (Cornell UP, 2013)
05 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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 an...
Kathleen Wellman, “Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France” (Yale UP, 2013)
21 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Queens and royal mistresses of the Renaissance were the Hollywood celebrities of their time, which explains their enduring magnetism for writers, arti...
Sandrine Sanos, “The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France” (Stanford University Press, 2013)
05 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Sandrine Sanos‘s new book, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford University Press, 2013...
Jennifer Sessions, “By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria” (Cornell UP, 2011)
21 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Early modern European imperialism is really pretty easy to understand. Spain, Portugal, England, France, Russia and the rest were ruled by people whos...
Daniel Sherman, "French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945-1975" (U Chicago Press, 2011)
05 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The "primitivist idea" has played an important role in art and culture from at least the late nineteenth century. From Paul Gauguin to Pablo Picasso, ...
Lindsay Krasnoff, “The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010” (Lexington Books, 2012)
14 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
In 1967, an official of the French basketball federation lamented the team’s poor finish at that year’s European Championships in Finland. The Fre...
Eric Jennings, “Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina” (University of California Press, 2011)
29 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
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 ai...
Sanja Perovic, "The Calendar in Revolutionary France" (Cambridge UP, 2012)
03 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Brumaire. Germinal. Thermidor. There is nothing more evocative of the French Revolutionary imaginary than the names of the months of the republican ca...
Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite, “Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France” (LSU Press, 2013)
31 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The stories of individual lives are endlessly complex, weaving together the contemporary events, the surrounding culture, and incorporating random fac...
Brian Sandberg, “Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)
15 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Brian Sandberg‘s Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) significantly revi...
Elizabeth Foster, “Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940” (Stanford University Press, 2013)
26 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
How did French colonial administrators, missionaries, and different groups of Africans interact with one another in colonial Senegal? In her new book,...
Mary Louise Roberts, “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
24 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Tracking soldiers from the villages and towns of Northern France, to the “Silver Foxhole” of Paris, to tribunals that convicted a disproportionate...
John E. Joseph, “Saussure” (Oxford UP, 2012)
20 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
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 fundamen...
Lisa Chaney, “Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life”
01 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
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 avail...
E. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
18 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Laurent Dubois, “Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France” (University of California Press, 2011)
24 Aug 2012
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Paul Friedland, “Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment In France” (Oxford University Press, 2012)
16 Jul 2012
Contributed by Lukas
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–p...
Nancy Hargrove, “T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year” (University of Florida Press, 2010)
15 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especia...
Carolina Armenteros, “The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854” (Cornell UP, 2011)
06 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Carolyn Burke, “No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf” (Knopf, 2011)
01 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
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 v...
Andrew Curran, “The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011)
10 Oct 2011
Contributed by Lukas
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 Nel...
Jeffrey H. Jackson, “Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2010)
13 Aug 2010
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 19th century, French sociologist Emile Durkheim warned the world about spreading “normlessness” (anomie). He claimed that modern socie...
Ruth Harris, “Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century” (Henry Holt, 2010)
17 Jun 2010
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Richard Fogarty, “Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008)
03 Nov 2008
Contributed by Lukas
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 “...