New Books in French Studies

Denise Z. Davidson joins Jana Byars to talk about Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters (Cornell UP, 2025). The book explores how two wealthy and well-connected families with roots in Lyon responded to the French Revolution and the resulting transformations. In building a new political system based on liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution encouraged both individuals and families to recognize their power to shape the world through political action, rethink their strategies in negotiating intimate relations and family life, and assess both terrifying new risks and enticing opportunities for advancement. Denise Z. Davidson traces two families' trajectories and weaves together the strategies they employed to survive and hopefully thrive in the decades that followed the Revolution. Their private correspondence shows that affect and interest, intimacy and property, are mutually constitutive, and cannot be "thought" separately. Her analysis reveals what it meant to be bourgeois, how gender played a role in the formation of class identities, and how family and emotional life overlapped with other arenas. These social and cultural themes are woven into the narrative through the stories told in the families' letters. By viewing dramatic historical events through the eyes of people who lived through them, Surviving Revolution illuminates how the practices of everyday life shaped emerging notions of bourgeois identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Our bodies and brains are radically transformable, mutable and plastic. From the neuroplasticity of the brain to the epigenetic malleability of our bodies and of all organic life, the work of the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou invites us to consider our plasticity as both a creative resource and an ethical challenge. Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film: Witnessing Plasticity (Edinburgh UP, 2026) brings Malabou's philosophy into dialogue with contemporary literature and film. It reads conceptions of plasticity and neuroplasticity in Malabou through the mutant bodies of Leos Carax's films; the shape-shifting bodies of Marie Darrieussecq's novels and theatre; the terrifying, traumatic metamorphoses depicted in the fiction of Marie NDiaye; and the anarchic sexualities and identities celebrated in the cinema and writing of Alain Guiraudie. It argues that, in different ways, Malabou's philosophy and literary and filmic texts develop modes of bearing witness to plasticity which can supplement, challenge and extend scientific understandings of biological plasticity, constituting ethical and creative sites of exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Despite being a major figure of Haitian literature, Jean-Claude Charles (1949-2008) has received relatively little scholarly attention to date. Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader's Guide (Liverpool UP, 2022) seeks to serve as an introduction to the work and universe of this unique and capital writer to an English-language readership. The essays in the collection are organized along three major axes: contextual articles, placing Charles' work within the larger Haitian literary landscape, punctual articles, addressing specific themes in a selection of Charles' books, and author testimonials, attesting to Charles' work's importance both to his contemporaries and to a new generation of writers. With the ongoing republication of Charles' work by Mémoire d'encrier in Montreal, and the increasing interest in the author, the proposed volume is timely and necessary, and is in large part a critical accompaniment to the republishing programme. Described by Dany Laferrière as "most brilliant Haitian author of his generation," Charles has until recently remained largely unread and little understood. As the various chapters in the volume show, Charles is an author for now, and the collection will accompany readers seeking strikingly original insights on issues such as race, migration, and exile, and the role of the author and literature in times of crisis. Guest Eliana Văgălău is Associate Professor and director of the French program at Loyola University Chicago. Her research on francophone Caribbean literature and contemporary philosophy focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, as well as on questions of transnationalism, diaspora, and sexuality. In addition to co-editing this volume, she has published articles on the work of authors such as Maryse Condé, James Noël, and Jean-Claude Charles. As a founding member of the Collectif Jean-Claude Charles, she dedicates much of her work to making visible the work of this fundamental Haitian author. She has published translations of literary and philosophical texts and is currently completing an essay on contemporary French Caribbean fiction. By teaching a course on Black Paris, her extensive collaborations with contemporary Black artists and writers living in France today, as well as serving as co-organizer of the Black Europe Symposium in 2023 at Loyola University Chicago, she has developed a secondary research interest in the city of Paris as achief site of Black transnational encounters. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Modern Paris is often hailed as a capital of urban infrastructure. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris in 1853–1870, branded “Haussmannization,” helped define urban modernity for cities worldwide. But even as infrastructures expanded and modernized, some Parisians were left behind: as late as 1928, 18 percent of houses still lacked direct sewerage. Haussmannization often hid infrastructures behind walls and floors, under streets, or in peripheral districts. In the forty years after 1870, a period that Dr. Peter Soppelsa calls “secondary Haussmannization,” Parisians inverted them—revealed their hidden components to scrutinize their workings and costs for society, environment, and health—and in turn politicized them. Drawing on French government archives, engineers' maps, the illustrated press, and a collection of over 100 photographic postcards, in Paris After Haussmann: Living with Infrastructure in the City of Light, 1870–1914 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2026) Dr. Soppelsa charts the diverse embodied, emotional, and everyday experiences of living with expanding urban infrastructures—streets, housing, tramways, subways, the water supply, sewers, and rivers—in Paris from 1870 to 1914. Parisians learned that infrastructures were not simply technical solutions for the social and environmental problems of city life but could also bring about new dangers and dependencies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Dangerous Creations: The Inventor Novel in Fin-de-siècle France (U Toronto Press, 2025) presents a master narrative of the inventor in fin-de-siècle French literature by analyzing the works of Jules Verne, Albert Robida, Émile Zola, and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Their writings challenge the role of science in shaping French national identity and aim to transform contemporary understandings of science and technology. The book reveals how Verne, Robida, Zola, and de l'Isle-Adam reimagine the figure of the inventor, reshaping the literary standards of their time. Universally male in these narratives, the inventor serves as a flawed exemplar of national heroism during the Age of Empire – a period marked by significant external threats and internal strife – while also embodying unrestrained creativity. Ultimately, the inventor novel reflects broader French anxieties surrounding scientific progress, empire, and gender. Ana Oancea explores the transmedia and transnational legacy of the fin-de-siècle inventor novel through vignettes that highlight similarly themed narratives in contemporary popular culture. These sections engage with films, television series, graphic narratives, and video games that reinterpret key aspects of the inventor narrative, shedding light on its power structures, racial and gender politics, and colonial aspirations. Guest Ana Oancea is Associate Professor of French at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include the intersections of science and literature, adaptation studies, and visual culture. She has recently published articles in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Science Fiction Film and Television, and French Screen Studies. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In the mid-1930s the amateur French ethnographer and filmmaker Bernard de Colmont ventured into the mountainous state of Chiapas to study the Lacandón people and broadcast their way of life to a curious European public. Considered a “lost tribe,” the Lacandón were thought to be the closest living relatives of the ancient Maya.De Colmont became a celebrity explorer whose adventures generated considerable attention. The Lacandón themselves, however, were silenced in his tale. Nearly a century later, in In the Land of the Lacandón: A Graphic History of Adventure and Imperialism (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025), Dr. Richard Ivan Jobs and Dr. Steven Van Wolputte have taken up this story in all its complexity, creating a graphic history from de Colmont's narratives and images in the form of a heroic adventure comic. An essay contextualizing and historicizing the tale follows, as does an evocative, reflective poem by Tsotsil writer Manuel Bolom Pale, which offers an Indigenous perspective on the encounter. A captivating experiment in form, the book puts an immersive new spin on studying the past.In the Land of the Lacandón illuminates de Colmont's expedition against the backdrop of late imperialism on the eve of the Second World War in Europe. It investigates the history of exploration, science, and media, revealing how these narratives represented and constructed Indigenous Peoples for the public – and how such representations continue to resonate. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Written under the shadow of growing authoritarianism in the United States and Europe, this book is an effort to understand resistance movements of the twenty-first century. It foregrounds the Yellow Vests to present an accurate and timely picture of a protest movement that baffled analysts and blurred the boundaries of left and right. Comprehensively exploring the meaning of “les Gilets Jaunes triompheront” (the yellow vests will win), written on the Arc de Triomphe in 2018, The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy details how people of all ages, many from the provinces and the urban periphery, rushed through the Paris streets, breaking windows and braving tear gas, challenging the ruling class in extraordinary and unpredictable ways. Avoiding hierarchy and stable organization, and claiming a right to a territory or space that is between the private and the public, these protests imagined a different form of collectivity that is not commodified but established by the social practice of “commoning”—of momentarily linking protests in the streets and other spaces. An essential book for activists and researchers on contemporary protest movements, this book offers crucial insight into the formation of protests and popular resistance and how social movements generate their own political and ideological character. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Today we are joined by Mattie Fitch, Associate Professor at Marymount University and author of The People, The Workers and the Citizens: Antifascist Cultures and the Popular Front in France, 1934-1939 (Routledge, 2026). In our conversation, we discussed the way that antifascist culture undergirded the French Popular Front, the tensions between the Communists, Socialists, and Radical antifascist projects, and the ways that each Popular Front party of defined “the people.” In The People, The Workers and the Citizens, Fitch explores Popular Front antifascist programs and the cultural work that illuminated their diverse visions for a “people's government.” The book is thematic: in her first chapter, Fitch examines the Communists' Maison de la Culture and the Fédération musicale populaire. The communist's efforts to produce a worker's culture successfully mobilized French national symbols in novel ways but had difficulties navigating between high and low culture. By contrast, chapter 2 centres on Jean Zay and the Radicals. Zay's influence abounded and he was willing to work with anyone in the Popular Front to see cultural access extended to all French citizens. Yet his vision of a civic nationhood clashed with his Communist and Socialist allies who privileged workers. The most enigmatic were the Socialists. Although they were the largest party in the French National Assembly, Leon Blum's party struggled to articulate an antifascist program that encompassed all of their voters. Their pacifism proved a problem in the context of a rising Nazi Germany, and they were squeezed between the increasing nationalism of the French Communists and the Radicals' appeal to the working class. Fitch's analysis moves beyond earlier studies that focus mostly (or only) on Paris. In chapters 4 and 5, she looks at the antifascist activities of politicians in Marseille and Rouen and finds two very different Popular Fronts at work in the regions. In Marseille, working class politics dominate and an authentic endogenous Popular Front culture precedes directives from the capital. While in Rouen, extremely moderate Radicals battle working class activists on the other side of town. Fitch's work is compelling and shines a new light on the history of the Popular Front. It will be of interest to scholars of modern France and political culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

After the collapse of the National Socialist regime in May 1945, France became one of four principal occupying powers in a defeated Germany. Within their zone of occupation along the Upper and Middle Rhine, French occupiers participated in the Allied project to remake German society. In the process, they confronted the long history of Franco-German rivalry in the region and their country's diminished power in the wake of World War II.From Occupation to Integration: Recivilizing the French Zone of Post-Nazi Germany, 1945-1955 (LSU Press, 2026) by Dr. Drew Flanagan explores how French ideas about civilization and the civilizing process shaped the practice of occupation in the French Zone and the early stages of European integration. The French Zone was set apart from the other Allied zones by the occupiers' belief that Nazi “barbarism” was deeply rooted in German culture and history. In seeking to transform the Germans along their border into acceptable partners for France within a united western Europe, the French occupiers applied aspects of France's universal “civilizing” mission, adapting strategies and practices developed in the country's overseas colonies to fit a European population.Whether implementing counterinsurgency methods developed in French North Africa in the pacification and control of their zone or attempting to address what they perceived as the deep-rooted flaws of German culture through reeducation and propaganda, the French applied their civilizational thinking, using that vision to justify and guide the first postwar attempts at cross-border economic integration. Through both conflicts and cooperation with the German population, the French in occupied Germany negotiated a shared vision of western European civilization that they hoped would ensure French leadership in Europe.In this engaging study, Dr. Flanagan deftly details and analyzes the entanglement between the Europeanization of the French Zone and decolonization in France's empire, prompting readers to consider the continued impact of colonial and imperial ideas and practices on contemporary Europe and the European Union. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

What happens when we assume women's presence in film history instead of their absence? This is the question at the heart of Archiving the Past: Women's Film History in France, 1927–1978, the newest addition to the Feminist Media Histories book series at the University of California Press. The first book by Aurore Spiers, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Texas A&M University, Archiving the Past is a fascinating account of some of the many women in France whose labor had a decisive role in the formation of cinema history across the twentieth century. Aurore shows that the film-historical archive has always been a site of feminist agency and power, even if women's work in and around the archive has been diminished, interrupted, erased, or ignored. In this conversation with fellow feminist film scholar Alix Beeston, Aurore shares about the historical, methodological, and political stakes of her work, from the archive to the classroom. She describes her process for discerning the traces of women's archival labor, however fleeting, contingent, or speculative they may be. She reflects on how gendered ideas and norms have defined—and limited—our sense of what counts as film-historical labor. And she ruminates on what it means for feminist scholars, in and beyond film and media studies, to collect and recollect the past—for the sake of the feminist present and its still-possible futures. Alix Beeston is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at Cardiff University. She's the author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford UP, 2018) and the co-editor of the award-winning volume Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Huguenot Networks: Truth and Secrecy in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge UP, 2025), Penny Robert's latest book, takes us into the world of secret intelligence gathering during the French Wars of Religion. Robert's discovery of the interrogation record of a Huguenot merchant, Jean Tivinat, arrested in May 1570 for attempting to secretly carry letters to England, unspools into a broader story about the intersections between confessional affiliations, international affairs, knowledge, trust, and networking in a tumultuous time. As she argues, clandestine communication was crucial to maintaining ties amongst a widely dispersed and threatened religious community. Huguenot Networks is a lively read and sure to appeal to anyone interested in the history of espionage, Huguenots, international affairs in Elizabethan England, or the French Wars of Religion. Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women's intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In 1971, the French government announced a massive extension of its military base on the Larzac plateau in southern France. Land was to be expropriated from 107 farms around the small town of La Cavalerie. Limited resistance was expected, but what happened next exceeded all expectations. Local sheep farmers set up protest camps and occupied the land. They soon attracted an astonishing level of support, pioneering a form of regional radicalism with global implications. Drawing out the international dimensions of the protest, Make cheese not war: Transnational resistance and the Larzac in modern France (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Andrew Smith explores a transnational resistance movement in the 1970s that challenged dominant visions of modernity and became a wellspring of radical alternatives. Exploring previously unconsulted archives in France and elsewhere, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the decade-long peasant movement and its aftermath. Repositioning the Larzac struggle within a wider network of French and international solidarities, from the US to the UK, Germany, Burkina Faso, New Caledonia and Japan, the book retraces political networks of pacifist activism, as well as environmental movements and anti-nuclear protest. It shows how this French peasant campaign became both a platform and a model for popular engagement. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film (Edinburgh UP, 2025), Leslie Barnes examines the ambivalences that mark Southeast Asian sex industries under global imperialism. She explores the multi-layered subjectivities of sex workers, procurers and clients, and interrogates the frameworks in which discourses surrounding sex work circulate. Engaged with debates concerning the status of transactional sex, Sex Work in Southeast Asia explores the symbolic force and concrete conditions of sex work in Cambodia and Vietnam, considering how these debates and the figures they ensnare are mediated by fiction and creative nonfiction. The book's scenes of ambivalence show how the aesthetic treatment of sex work stretches the paradigms we use to make sense not only of sex work, but also of art, the evidentiary status of testimony and the spectacles of pleasure and suffering. Contesting essentialism and authenticity, and working to suspend judgement, these scenes encourage a re-examination of what we think we know about sex work, how we know it and what we do with that knowledge. Leslie Barnes is an Associate Professor of French Studies at the Australian National University. She is author of Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (2014) and co-editor of The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul (2021). We previously chatted on New Books about her work on the great Cambodian film director Rithy Panh, so was excited to speak with her again about Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – can transform the ordinary experience of selfhood. Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness (U Toronto Press, 2022) explores the nature of disruptive self-experiences and the different shapes they have taken in literary writing. The book focuses on the tension between rival conceptions of unselfing as either a form of productive self-transcendence or a form of alienating self-loss. Michaela Hulstyn explores the shapes and meanings of unselfing through the framework of the global French literary world, encompassing texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium alongside writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. Together these diverse texts prompt a re-evaluation of the consequences of the loss or the transcendence of the self. Through a series of close readings, Hulstyn offers a new account of the ethical questions raised by altered states and shows how philosophies of empathy can be tested against and often challenged by literary works. Drawing on cognitive science and phenomenology, Unselfing provides a new methodology for approaching texts that give shape to the fringes of conscious experience. Guest Dr. Michaela Hulstyn is Associate Director of the Structured Liberal Education Program at Stanford University. Her research interests include philosophy and Literature; 20c and 21c French and Francophone African thought, cognitive approaches to aesthetics; global phenomenology; intermediality; decolonization; narrative. In addition to her monograph, she has published articles related to a number of these topics in forums such as Modern Fiction Studies, Philosophy and Literature, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites.Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

How did the far right go from illegitimate fringe to contender for public office, and did Europe have anything to do with it? Europe As Ideological Resource: European Integration and Far Right Legitimation in France and Italy (Oxford UP, 2024) argues that European integration functioned as an ideological resource for far right parties looking for legitimation because it enabled them to refashion their political message in a more acceptable form, while maintaining the allegiance of their existing supporters.Drawing on the qualitative analysis of over 400 documents produced by the Movimento Sociale Italiano/Alleanza Nazionale in Italy (1978-2009) and the Rassemblement National in France (1978-2019), Lorimer identifies the core concepts and discourses the parties used to talk about Europe, and the legitimation mechanisms associated with them. The book's narrative is developed through the analysis of four key concepts: the concept of identity, which enabled the parties to transnationalise their message and create a positive association between themselves and Europe; the concept of liberty, which made it possible for them to foster an image of actors holding uncontroversial positions; the concept of threat, which helped them promote the idea that 'desperate times call for desperate measures; and the concept of national interest, which helped them stress commitment to core principles in their ideology.Ever since its re-emergence on the European political scene, scholars have sought to explain the mainstreaming of the far right. By understanding how the process of European integration facilitated its transition from the margins to the mainstream, this book adds one piece to the puzzle of far right legitimation. Marta Lorimer is a Lecturer in Politics at the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University, where she teaches on European politics and populism, and co-editor of the journal Political Research Exchange. Her research on far-right politics and European integration has been published widely, including in the Journal of European Public Policy and the Journal of Common Market Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In Belle Époque Paris, the Eiffel Tower was newly built, France was experiencing remarkable political stability, and American women were painting the town and gathering at a female-only Residence known as The American Girls' Club in Paris. Opened in 1893, The Club was the center of expatriate living and of dedication to a calling in the fine arts, and singularly harbored a generation of independent, talented, and driven American women.Now in The Club: Where American Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris (Bloomsbury, 2025), curator, art historian, and podcast host Jennifer Dasal presents the untold story of the Club, the philanthropists who created it, and the artists it housed. These women forged connections in the arts and letters with luminaries like Auguste Rodin and Gertrude Stein or became activists through their relationships with the likes of Emmeline Pankhurst. But just as importantly, these women's lives revealed the power of the Club itself, and the way that having a safe home for single women of ambition allowed them to grow as teachers, artists, suffragists, and people. A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life Our guest is: Jennifer Dasal, who is the creator and host of the ArtCurious podcast, the author of ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History. She holds an MA in art history, and is the former curator of modern and contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She lectures frequently on art both locally and nationally Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Artisans and Designers Thanks To Life In The Garden Behind The Moon Jumping Through Hoops Your Art Will Save Your Life The Artists Joy Speaking While Female My What-if Year We Take Our Cities With Us Pursuing Life Abroad Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France (Northwestern University Press 2025) explores the relationship between sensory experience, state ideology, and artistic form, examining literature and art inspired by comets that unsettled the heliocentric order to which French politics and culture aspired. Guest Claire Goldstein Professor of French and Director of the Humanities Program at UC Davis. Her research in ancien régime French-language literature and culture has explored subjects such as garden design, art and architecture; theater, ballet, and fête performances; astronomy; early modern fashion accessories; and early journalism. Claire's current projects include Jesuit school ballets; female itinerant clothing resellers; and the innovative and enterprising publishing practices of Nicholas de Blégny, a best-selling and long forgotten multi-hyphenate physician-author. Her scholarship is motivated by her abiding interests in visual and material culture, her curiosity about how the things people see, and the objects and material practices that they engage with, create cultural meanings. She is the author of In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth Century France (Northwestern UP, 2025) and Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures, and Accidents That Made Modern France (U Penn Press, 2007). Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In Gems and the New Science: Matter and Value in the Scientific Revolution (U Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Michael Bycroft argues that gems were connected to major developments in the “new science” between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. As he explains, precious and semiprecious stones were at the center of dramatic shifts in natural knowledge in early modern Europe. They were used to investigate luminescence, electricity, combustion, chemical composition, and more. They were collected by naturalists; measured by mathematicians; and rubbed, burned, and dissolved by experimental philosophers. This led to the demise of the traditional way of classifying gems—which grouped them by transparency, color, and locality—and the turn to density, refraction, chemistry, and crystallography as more reliable guides for sorting these substances. The science of gems shows that material evaluation was as important as material production in the history of science. It also shows the value of seeing science as the product of the interaction between different material worlds. The book begins by bringing these insights to bear on five themes of the Scientific Revolution. Each of the subsequent chapters deals with a major episode in early modern science, from the expansion of natural history in the sixteenth century to the emergence of applied science early in the nineteenth century. This important work is not only the first book-length history of the science of gems but also a fresh interpretation of the Scientific Revolution and an argument for using a new form of materialism to understand the evolution of science. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The introduction of the principle of women's reproductive liberty in France, tentatively by the family planning movement after 1960 and explicitly by the women's liberation movement after 1970, marked a deep shift, transforming public discourses. Yet this principle remained fiercely contested, and moderate and conservative actors responded by foregrounding notions of 'reproductive responsibility', or the expectation that individuals perform the 'right' sexual and family-making behaviour, benefiting not only themselves and their families, but the nation at large. Such responsibilisation underpinned the legal reforms of the 1960s-70s, framing a notion of reproductive citizenship based on a tension between individual rights and social norms. Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Feminism, Contraception, and Abortion, 1950-1980 (Oxford UP, 2025) breaks new ground by taking an intersectional approach to the defining moments of this period: the legalisation of contraception (the laws of 1967 and 1974) and the liberalisation of abortion (1975, 1979). Drawing on a wide range of sources and actors - including feminist and family planning movements, government actors, demographers, medical-professional organisations, disability rights groups, and key actors in the overseas departments - Maud Bracke demonstrates how the discourse of responsibilisation allowed actors to distinguish between citizens 'worthy' of reproductive rights and those seen as less worthy. Bracke analyses the distinct regulations regarding contraception in the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, framed by racialised anti-natalism. The book also demonstrates that disability rights organisations contributed to the discrediting of the notion of 'eugenic abortion', used among experts and policy-makers until the early 1970s. Furthermore, Bracke goes on to highlight the silence in the feminist movement around both disability rights and race as part of its universalisation of women's conditions of oppression, and analyses the emergence of Black Feminism in late-1970s France. In so doing, the book offers a major contribution to the history of sex, gender, family life, healthcare, demography, and political debate in post-war France, and more generally. Guest Dr. Maud Bracke is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Glasgow, and is also the author of Which Socialism? Whose Detente? West European Communism and the Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 in 2007 and Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy (1968-1983) in 2014, as well as the co-editor of Translating Feminism: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Text, Place and Agency in 2021. In addition to authoring numerous journal articles and book chapters and co-editing several special issues of academic journalsb she is also an editor at the Journal of Modern European History and sits on various other editorial boards.  Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean (Rutgers UP, 2025) examines the relationship between the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of caregiving that have emerged from the French Caribbean. Putting in dialogue postcolonial studies and care studies, this book elucidates how caring and uncaring have been historically shaped by colonialism and shows how media and narratives help develop decolonial approaches to care that sustain human life and livable environments. Guest Jennifer Boum-Maké is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. In addition to her monograph, she has co-edited 2025's Graphic Narratives of Resistance: Advocating for Representation and Social Justice in French-Language Bandes Dessinées. In addition to many journal articles and contributions to collected volumes, she serves on a number of editorial boards and is one of the founders of Kwazman vwa: New Paths in Caribbean literature, an online series hosting conversations with ultracontemporary Caribbean writers. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

A compelling dual biography of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle that shines new light on two of the greatest figures of the 20th century.Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle were thrown together by war. They incarnated the resistance of Britain and France to the existential threat from Nazi Germany, and their ultimate victory over Hitler has ensured their achievements will never be forgotten. But, as The Last Titans: How Churchill and De Gaulle Saved Their Nations and Transformed the World (Simon & Schuster, 2026) shows, that is only a part of a complex story. Both men influenced their countries, and the world around them, long after the war was won.There was a paradox in the parallel and intertwined lives of these extraordinary men. De Gaulle—tall, gauche, and incorruptible—exhibited qualities often associated with the English. Churchill—short, charming, witty, and a bon vivant—resembled the quintessential politician of the French Third Republic. Their working relationship was rarely smooth, but they appreciated each other's stature: de Gaulle said Churchill was “the great artist of a great history,” while Churchill recognized de Gaulle as “l'homme du destin.”Richard Vinen explores what made these men exceptional and how profoundly they were influenced by their national cultures. Beyond personal intrigue, Vinen makes a wider point that Britain and France are both haunted by perceptions of past greatness. He retraces the paths of two leaders who once helmed superpowers but lived to see their nations weakened by two world wars and the loss of empires.Written with extraordinary narrative verve, The Last Titans offers a fresh exploration into the lives of de Gaulle and Churchill. By bringing their two stories into one, each man is seen anew and we gain fresh insights into their achievements and their legacy today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

A princess born to the Thuringian royal house. A captive in war, forced to marry the Frankish king who killed her family. A queen, who renounced her position, received consecration as a deaconess, and took monastic vows. A religious leader, who acquired a fragment of the Cross of the Crucifixion for her convent of Holy Cross in Poitiers. And, lastly, a saint, remembered for her healings, exorcisms, and extreme self-mortification. Such was Radegund, a woman who lived through an era defined by headlong change. Honored as a "mother" by subsequent Frankish kings and as a holy woman by her nuns and devotees, Radegund enjoyed a reputation for righteousness that spread throughout the whole of medieval Europe, with later queens emulating her pious achievements. For generations, she defined medieval queenship, female monastic practice, and the expectations associated with holy women. Today, she is often envisioned as a pan-European saint. Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. E. T. Dailey presents a new interpretation of this remarkable woman, examining her vibrant life and legacy. Dr. Dailey shows how she succeeded in establishing a place for herself within this difficult and dangerous world, despite the trials she faced. He also demonstrates how Radegund achieved a position of prominence as a woman in a foreign land without resorting to the violence and intrigue that characterized the lives of other prominent women during this period. Based on a wealth of English, French, and German scholarship, this book will equip experts and lay readers with a concise, authoritative, and accessible portrait of Radegund. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Le Corbusier on Camera: The Unknown Films of Ernest Weissmann (Birkhaüser, 2024) is based on amateur films, shot by the architect Ernest Weissmann (1903-1985) with a Pathé Motocamera in the years 1929-1933 at, among other places, the Atelier Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. These films capture moments from Le Corbusier's life that have never been seen before. It also documents his friendships with Pierre Jeanneret, Josep Lluís Sert, Charlotte Perriand, Norman Rice, Kunio Maekawa, Sigfried Giedion and others. Across six chapters, the book shows impressive stills from these films and places them in the respective historical and personal context of Le Corbusier in introductory texts. Two introductions are devoted to the history of these pioneering amateur films and to Ernest Weissmann's life and his life-long relationship with Le Corbusier. Veronique Boone is an architect from the University of Ghent, Belgium and doctor from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture et de Paysage de Lille (ENSAPL), France and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. She is an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta at the ULB. She lectures on architectural history and theory as well as on the conservation of 20th-century architecture. Her research focuses on the history and theory, as well as the construction history, of modern architecture. She has published extensively in academic publications on Le Corbusier and the mediation of architecture by film and television, and is a correspondant for Belgian and international architectural magazines on contemporary architecture. She has worked on several exhibitions as curator and/or contributor to catalogues – among them, Lucien Hervé, l'oeil de l'architecte, CIVA, 2005; Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography, Musée des beaux-arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, 2012; L'Architecture modern à l'écran, Cinematek, 2014; In the Studio at 35, rue de Sèvres: an Amateur cameraman's Informal View, Fondation Le Corbusier, 2017 and Atelier Jespers, 2018. She is also Vice-President of DOCOMOMO Belgium. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

When Virginie Despentes (1969) published her provocative debut novel Baise-moi in 1994, no one could have anticipated how she would gradually become a literary, feminist, and punk icon. This book is the first holistic, interdisciplinary approach to Despentes's novels and evolution as an author. Using feminist, queer, literary, and punk theories, the book examines how Despentes has developed and refined her Grrrl writing in Baise-moi, Les Chiennes savantes, and Les Jolies choses. Michèle Schaal's Grrrl Writing: Virginie Despentes's Authorial Politics (Peter Lang, 2026) specifically illustrates how her unique authorial politics, infused with punk, genre- and genderbending praxes, have provided an acerbic critique of still largely heteropatriarchal French society. Despentes's Grrrl writing denounces how this system engenders and thrives on injustice and social inequities, but also how conventions at play in classic or populist literary genres can perpetuate oppression as well Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell UP, 2024) gives an historical account of the evolution of the matchmaking business during the Second Empire in France. The book explores how the matchmaking industry at the Postrevolutionary France was shaped by commodified stories of hope and fantasy, including democratization of the matchmaking business, which aroused the interest of democratized French audience, including lower-middle-class individuals, through exaggerated advertisements in the media productions. The book also gives an exposition on the period of French Revolution and how it significantly altered family legislation and marriage practices, leading to increased freedom in spouse selection and the rise of professional matchmakers like Claude Viome. The book highlights how the revolutionary reforms impact on marriage of the French populace, including the age reduction policy for the majority and lifting of parental consent for marriage, as well as introducing divorce by mutual consent in 1792. According to Andrea Mansker, the changes in age and divorce policy, combined with increased mobility and changing social patterns in Paris, encouraged young people across classes to demand more freedom in spouse selection, leading Claude Viome to market his services as a way to bypass traditional family negotiations in courtship. The book relates the1804 Civil Code, explaining how it preserved revolutionary reforms like equality before the law but restored traditional family structures by treating married women and children as legal minors under their husband's authority. It exposes how divorce became less common and eventually outlawed in 1816, and detailed the French Supreme Court's 1855 ruling against matchmaker contracts, which viewed marriage as a sacred agreement distinct from commercial transactions.  Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam's greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links @ | LinkedIn here | ORCID here | Meta here | Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In 1863 the French established a protectorate over the kingdom of Cambodia. The protectorate, along with Vietnam and Laos, later became part of the colonial state of French Indochina. Part of the French ‘civilizing mission' in Cambodia involved reforming Cambodian law and legal processes.  Sally Low's pioneering study, Colonial Law Making: Cambodia under the French (NUS Press, 2023), tells the story of the encounter between what she calls two different legal and social ‘cosmologies': Cambodia's indigenous legal tradition and modern French legal thinking. While the French claimed they were modernizing Cambodian law, in fact they imposed many elements of French law. Initially, they dispossessed the king of much of his judicial authority. But ironically, the French reform of Cambodian law retained the monarchy as the semi-divine source of law, and royal power was subsequently legally embedded into new national institutions, the law, and the constitutions. At independence in 1953, 90 years after the French began their protectorate, Cambodia's King Sihanouk inherited this legal apparatus which had done so much to enhance the power of the executive over the judiciary. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India. The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways. Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Harvard UP, 2026) illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building. This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Today we are joined by Claire Nicolas, a chercheuse du Fonds National Suisse at Basel University, a holder of a prestigious Ambizione Research Grant, and the author of Une si longue course: Sport, genre, et citoyenneté au Ghana et en Côte d'Ivoire (années 1900-1970) (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024). In our conversation, we discussed physical culture in colonial and post-colonial Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, the differences and the similarities between the imperial and post-imperial biopolitical strategies in both places, and the way that sports histories benefit from sustained engagement with critical theory. In Une si longue course, Nicolas engages in a sustained comparison between the colonial and post-colonial physical cultural life of Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana. She organizes her work into two sections: one on colonial West Africa and another on post-colonial West Africa. Each section has three chapters covering physical education, scouting and sports. Her work addresses athletic life from the top down and the bottom up. In doing so, she shows that contrary to any simple history of teleological progress or sport as a crucible for nationalism, physical education, scouting and sport have been imperfect tools for imperial and post-imperial states. Athletes, scouts, and students found innovative ways to reshape the physical cultural priorities of the state to suit their own agendas. This deeply ambitious work significantly adds to our understanding of physical culture in colonial and post-colonial West Africa through a comparative approach. It draws upon extensive primary source research: Nicolas works in the archives of the British and French colonial states, the ministries of post-colonial Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, and the repositories of international sporting organizations in Switzerland. She also relies upon oral histories conducted with Ghanaian and Ivoirian sportsmen and women. Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Great Britain, and France: their physical cultural programmes shared continuities and ruptures. Colonial empires concerned with the mise en valeur of their subjects sought biopolitical solutions to increase the birthrate, expand agricultural and industrial production, and prepare men for the defence of the empire. They worried that physical cultural programs – if poorly managed – would become sites for resistance, but Nicolas' work shows that sporting clubs, scouting halls, and schools could confound any simple collaboration/resistance dichotomy. Nicolas' work also demonstrates the deeply gendered nature of both colonial and post-colonial physical culture. Newly emergent post-colonial nations sought to produce new men (and women) in ways that replicated the essentialism of their imperial predecessors. Nicolas' engaging work, thoroughly researched, and beautifully presented will be of broad interest to people invested in British, French, and West African history. It has broader conclusions for people interested in colonial and post-colonial theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Their names are Mohamed, Samira, sometimes Matthieu or Sophie. They were born and bred in France and are highly qualified, but they have decided to go and live in London or New York, Montreal or Brussels, Geneva or Dubai. Many were discriminated against on the French job market, or stigmatized simply because of their religion or the sound of their names. Whether devout or not, they felt unloved and unwanted in France, but abroad they have found a sense of peace and fulfilment that their native country failed to give them.Based on extensive original research, France, You Love It but Leave It: The Silent Flight of French Muslims (Polity, 2025) by Dr. Olivier Esteves, Dr. Alice Picard, and Dr. Julien Talpin sheds new light on the silent and largely unacknowledged flight abroad of French Muslims. It explores their motivations, their experiences in France and abroad, and their sense of Frenchness, torn between gratitude and bitterness. This book isn't just about an unreported brain-drain - it is also about the deleterious effects of Islamophobia in a country that balks at the very mention of the concept. And it highlights a pressing issue that many nations with Muslim minorities need to confront. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Libraries in French colonial Vietnam functioned as symbols of Western modernity and infrastructures of colonial knowledge. Yet Vietnamese readers pursued alternative uses of the library that exceeded imperial intentions. In Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam (U California Press, 2026), Cindy Any Nguyen examines the Hanoi and Saigon state libraries in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam, uncovering the emergence of a colonial public who reimagined the political meaning and social space of the library through public critique and day-to-day practice. Comprising government bureaucrats, library personnel, journalists, and everyday library readers, this colonial public debated the role of libraries as educational resource, civilizing instrument, and literary heritage.  Moving beyond procolonial or anticolonial nationalism framings, Bibliotactics advances a relational theory of power that centers public reading culture contextualized within the library infrastructure of the colonial information order. As the first comprehensive history of the colonial and national library in Asia, this book contributes new insights into publicity, colonial and postcolonial studies, and the histories of Vietnam, libraries, and information. Bibliotactics is available open access from Luminosa. Visit here to download a copy for free. Cindy Anh Nguyen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies and the Digital Humanities program at the University of California, Los Angeles. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba's Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And yet when things seemed to be going well for Jews in Western Europe and North America generally and France especially, the infamous fin de siècle Dreyfus affair brought to the surface some of the worst kinds of bigotry and animus--like contemporaneous Russian pogroms a premonition of the deadly looming revival of ethnic or religious divisions that had seemed a thing of the past. Our guest today, historian Maurice Samuels, author of many fine books on French history (Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2010), and The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016))and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has written a crackerjack new book. Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, (Yale 2024) has written a wonderful account of Dreyfus himself and how should we understand what that turmoil has ot tell us how Jews then (and perhaps today) coexisted with a mainstream secular Christian society either by way of assimilation or (not quite the same thing) by peaceful integration that preserved cultural distinctions. The discussion ranges widely, setting the scene in the prior centuries when Jews settled all over France, and then were accorded unusual rights by the universalist vision of the French Revolution. Maurie also explains why succeeding generations in France included the ascension not only of Leon Blum the Jewish socialist (and inventor of the weekend!) who improbably led anti-fascist France during in the 1930's--but also the other Jews who followed him as political leaders in France, right up to the present-day. From Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) forward, Maurie shows, intellectuals have missed the significance of the way Dreyfus and his family integrated without assimilating. The conversation culminating in Maurie introducing John to the fascinating "Franco-French War" about what that coexistence should look like: assimilation which presumes the disappearance of a distinctive Jewish cultural identity, or integration which posits the peaceful coexistence of French citizens of various religions and cultures. Mentioned in the episode Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (1844) George Eliot's (perhaps philosemitic) Daniel Deronda (1876) Why does Yale have a Hebrew motto, אורים ותומים (light and perfection)? The Haitian Revolution in its triumphs and tribulations is an analogy that helps explain jewish Emancipation--and also in some ways a tragic counterexample. The horrifying Great Replacement Theory we have heard so much about in America (eg in Charlottesville in 2017) began in France; Maurie has some thoughts about that. Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair. America's racial "one drop" rule. Pierre Birnbaum, Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (Yale, 2015) Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-century Liberal Political Writing: Political Zoologies of the French Enlightenment (Routledge, 2024) shows how our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Michèle Duchet and others have shown, French Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophical anthropology to support new political norms and models. This book explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authors—Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and Rétif de La Bretonne—also constructed a "political zoology" in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida, Latour, de Fontenay, and others, it shows how these five authors signed on to the old rhetorical tradition of animal comparisons in political philosophy, which they renewed via the findings and speculations of contemporary science. Engaging with recent scholarship on Enlightenment political thought, it also explores the links between their political zoologies and their family resemblance as "liberal" political thinkers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings (Liverpool UP, 2025) bridges the gap between the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It collectively fosters new transoceanic modes of thinking to reframe postcolonial debates and reveal the interconnected dialogues led by women from former French colonies and post-contact island territories. Thus, the volume unsettles the male agenda (captains, missionaries, mariners, ethnographers), and pays attention to the ways in which artists, writers, and activists have theorized or poetized women and the seas, reclaimed agency and created transformative possibilities. To critically map out a gendered conversation with the ocean, the contributors explore activisms and feminisms, intersectional praxes of care, ecological and health impacts of nuclear radiation and chlordecone contamination, queerness, decolonizing dance, the unsettling of official archives and female tidalectical corporeality and embodiments, Mā'ohi epistemologies and ontologies, silence as empowerment against colonial violence, forced migration and vulnerability. The volume's overarching approach belongs to a "politics of refusal" which brings forth formerly discarded archives and discredited sites of knowledge to counter ideologies and doctrinal apparatus that promote forgetting or erasure among non-sovereign populations. In exploring transoceanic feminine spaces as vital sites of knowledge production, this interdisciplinary collaboration aims to ensure that readers actively engage with feminine praxes, understanding their significance not only as theoretical constructs but as lived experiences (re)occupying, (re)appropriating and transcending patriarchal and postcolonial spaces. Jacqueline Couti is the Laurence H. Favrot Professor of French in the Department of Modern & Classical Literatures & Cultures at Rice University and the author of 2016's Dangerous Creole Liaisons: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses from 1806 to 1897 and 2021's Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses 1924–1948, as well as editing several critical editions and special journal issues, and authoring numerous articles and book chapters.  Anny-Dominique Curtius is Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Iowa, and has published two monographs : Symbioses d'une mémoire: Manifestations religieuses et littératures de la Caraibe in 2006 and Suzanne Césaire. Archéologie littéraire et artistique d'une mémoire empêchée in 2020. She has also co-edited a special issue of Esprit Créateur on “Francophonies of the Early Modern,” and published extensively in academic journals and edited volumes. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In both the United States and France, each side of the legal battle over same-sex marriage and parenthood relied heavily on experts. Despite the similarity of issues, however, lawmakers in each country turned to different sets of authorities: from economists and psychoanalysts to priests and ordinary people. They even prized different types of expertise—empirical research in the United States versus abstract theory in France.Exploring the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States and France, Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer sheds new light on the power of experts to influence high-stakes democratic debates. Drawing on extensive interviews and ethnographic observation, Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer traces the divergences between the two countries, showing why some experts are ubiquitous in one but absent in the other. He argues that lawmakers, judges, lawyers, journalists, and activists covet something only experts can provide: the credibility and aura of authority, or “expert capital,” which they deploy to advance their agendas. Expert capital is not derived from scientific or technical merit alone but is produced through cultural norms, material resources, and social relationships, which vary greatly across national contexts.Through the story of the fight over gay rights, By the Power Vested in Me: How Experts Shape Same-Sex Marriage Debates (Columbia UP, 2025) reveals how and why certain experts—but not others—obtain the authority to shape public opinion and policy. At a time of soaring public distrust in experts, this book offers new ways to understand the contested political role of expertise and its consequences. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University, where he specializes in the cultural and interpretive study of space, behavior, and identity. His scholarship examines how designed environments shape social interaction, connectedness, and moral life across diverse settings. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His current research projects include the study of escape rooms as emotion-structured environments, temporal urban environments in rural historical towns, student experiences of hanging out and being at home while at college and university, and a more recent study on the making of rodeo. To learn more about his work, visit his personal website, Google Scholar profile, or connect with him on Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social) or Twitter/X (@ProfessorJohnst). He can also be reached directly by email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Today we are joined by Dr. Lindsay Krasnoff, who is an historian, specializing in global sport, communications and diplomacy. She is also the Director of FranceandUS, and she lectures on sports diplomacy at New York University Tisch Institute of Global Sport. We met to talk about her most recent book: Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA (Bloomsbury, 2023). In our conversation, we discussed the rise of basketball in France, the differences between French and American basketball, and the way that French basketball stars such as Boris Diaw exemplify the new global “empire” of basketball that incorporates Africa, France and its overseas departments, and the USA. Krasnoff divides Basketball Empire into three parts that together investigate how French basketball developed from a low point in the middle of the 20th century to a global powerhouse contributing players to the NBA and the WNBA almost every year. Krasnoff argues that French basketball's success hinges on their ability make use of their connections both with the United States and with their former empire. In examining the growth of basketball in France, Krasnoff traces a sporting genealogy that links together players, coaches, and even commentators from around the globe who compete together in France and help produce a distinctive French style of basketball that nevertheless has appeal outside of the hexagon. In Basketball Empire, Krasnoff's first section takes off from her previous work on French association football, which looked at the development of Les Bleus. In the 1950s and 1960s, French basketball too was in crisis. In response, the French government, the Fédération française de basket-ball (FFBB), and even some sporting associations sought out new ways to improve the quality of play in France. Paris University Club brought in Americans who had played basketball in the NCAA but were now living in France to teach American approaches to the game. Individual players, including one of the earliest female French basketball stars Elisabeth Riffiod, watched film of American professionals like Bill Russell. The government redeveloped a national training centre: the National Institute of Sport, Expertise, and Performance (INSEP.) The French League professionalized in 1987. Since the 1990s, French basketball has enjoyed a rising number of successful EuroBasket and Olympic campaigns, including a men's silver and a women's bronze in 2020/21. Basketball Empire's second section uses micro-biographies to explore the ways that contemporary French players developed their skills, how they made their moves into the NCAA, the NBA or the WNBA, and the challenges and opportunities that these moves provided them as players. In this section in particular, Krasnoff's ability land and conduct interviews shines. She shows how diverse players, including Boris Diaw, Sandrine Gruda, Nicolas Batum, Marine Johannès, Diandra Tchatchouang, Evan Fournier, Mickaël Gelabale, and Rudy Gobert have become not only basketball stars but also informal diplomats that help build connections and translate between Africa, France and the United States. In the final section, Krasnoff considers why the French have been so successful at producing high quality men's and women's basketball players. She credits la formation à la française: the specific French training system that includes a national sports training center (the INSEP) as well as local and regional basketball academies (pôles espoirs). The future looks bright for French basketball and in our interview Krasnoff predicts French and US success in the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympiad. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Susannah Wilson joins Jana Byars to talk about A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell UP, 2025). The monograph examines the death of a five-year-old girl in late nineteenth-century France, unfolding the mystery through judicial investigations, psychiatric medical evaluations, and ultimately, a trial for murder. The investigators quickly learned that the child, Henriette, had been abducted by Marie-Françoise Fiquet, an employee at the city tobacco factory and known troublemaker. Fiquet had taken the child back to her home and kept her there all day. But what actually happened between the abduction at midday and the discovery of the child's body at five o'clock in the morning remained a mystery. Susannah Wilson uses archival records, press coverage, and psychiatric reports to reveal how the troubled history and reputation of Marie-Françoise Fiquet, marked by suspicions of sexual debauchery, infanticide, abortions, poisoning, theft, and extortion, was a case study in an emerging medical paradigm. Her signs of trauma, psychological disturbance, and medical morphine abuse provide insight into factitious disorders—or simulated illnesses—that would be more commonly observed in the following century. A Most Quiet Murder provides a new view of nineteenth-century France, where the law and public authorities intervened in the lives of the working classes and their children during moments of crisis to exercise the law of the land. The murder of a child reveals the connections between the psychology of female violence, the emergent understanding of factitious disorders, and the psychologically complex motives that extend beyond simple altruism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Stuart Carroll's Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023) transforms our understanding of Europe between 1500 and 1800 by exploring how ordinary people felt about their enemies and the violence it engendered. Enmity, a state or feeling of mutual opposition or hostility, became a major social problem during the transition to modernity. He examines how people used the law, and how they characterised their enmities and expressed their sense of justice or injustice. Through the examples of early modern Italy, Germany, France and England, we see when and why everyday animosities escalated and the attempts of the state to control and even exploit the violence that ensued. This book also examines the communal and religious pressures for peace, and how notions of good neighbourliness and civil order finally worked to underpin trust in the state. Ultimately, enmity is not a relic of the past; it remains one of the greatest challenges to contemporary liberal democracy. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Matt Dawson's The Political Durkheim: Sociology, Socialism, Legacies (Routledge, 2023) presents Durkheim as an important political sociologist, inspired by and advocating socialism. Through a series of studies, it argues that Durkheim's normative vision, which can be called libertarian socialism, shaped his sociological critique and search for alternatives. With attention to the value of this political sociology as a means of understanding our contemporary world, the author asks us to look again at Durkheim. While Durkheim's legacy has often emphasised the supposed conservative elements and stability advocated in his thought, we can point to a different legacy, one of a radical sociology. In dialogue with the decolonial critique, this volume also asks ‘was Durkheim white?' and in doing so shows how, as a Jew, he experienced significant racialisation in his lifetime. A new reading and a vital image of a ‘political Durkheim', The Political Durkheim will appeal to scholars and students with interests in Durkheim, social theory and political sociology. Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

An engaging investigation of how 13 key Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. Over the first decades of the 18th century, Christianity began to lose its grip on the story of humankind. Yet centuries of xenophobia, religious intolerance, and proto-biological ideas did not simply disappear. This raw material was increasingly “processed” by secularly minded thinkers who claimed the right to rethink the category of the human. By century's end, naturalists and classifiers had divided the human species into racial categories using methods that we now associate with the Enlightenment era. In Biography of a Dangerous Idea, prize-winning biographer and Enlightenment specialist Andrew S. Curran retells this story through the medium of group biography. Written more like a detective story than traditional history, the book traces the emergence of race through the lives of 13 pivotal figures, among them Louis XIV, Buffon, Linnaeus, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Blumenbach, Kant, and Jefferson. Moving from the gilded halls of Versailles to the slave plantations of the Caribbean, from the court of the Mughal Empire to the drawing rooms of Monticello, this sweeping narrative not only reveals how the Enlightenment's ultimate Promethean quest intertwined with systems of oppression and empire, but also offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the era's most famous luminaries. Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Drawing on memory studies and theatrical history, Commemorative Acts: French Theatre and the Memory of the Great War (University of Toronto Press, 2025) analyses a neglected body of plays staged in France after the Great War, between 1918 and 1937, to reveal their profound impact on collective memory and cultural identity. In the aftermath of the Great War, a remarkable wave of collective commemoration emerged, but the aesthetic diversity of this period has often been overshadowed by a singular focus on the combatant experience, primarily conveyed through fiction and memoir. This selective historical narrative has fostered a homogenized memory of the war, neglecting the rich array of cultural productions that also emerged alongside it. Commemorative Acts challenges these prevailing assumptions about the memory of the Great War and its literary expression in interwar France by spotlighting theatrical works that have largely been forgotten. The book uncovers how the dominance of first-person accounts of soldiers' experiences has subtly, yet powerfully, narrowed our understanding of what the memory of the Great War can encompass. It explores how drama, structurally at odds with the first-person perspective and defined by its simultaneous modes of expression and reception, has been lost to collective memory. By examining the unique capacity of the dramatic form to capture war trauma, Commemorative Acts offers insights that differ from those of other literary genres, highlighting the theatre's potential to provide a more expansive and nuanced understanding of interwar memorial culture. Author Susan McCready is Professor of French at the University of South Alabama and the co-director for the Center for the Study of War and Memory at South Alabama; she is also the author of 2016's Staging France between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon and 2007's The Limits of Performance in the French Romantic Theatre, as well as the co-editor of Novel Stages: Drama and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France in 2007. She has also co-edited a volume of Lingua Romana on France and Memory in the Great War, and has authored many academic articles and chapters on French theater and related topics, as well as a number of public humanities projects on war and memory.  Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan  France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The outbreak of the First World War shattered the established European art market. Amidst fighting, looting, confiscations, expropriation fears and political and economic upheaval, an integrated marketplace shaped by upper-class patrons broke down entirely. In its place, Maddalena Alvi argues, can be found the origins of a recognizably modern market of nationalized spheres driven by capitalist investment and speculation, yet open to wider social strata. Delving into auction records, memoirs, newspaper articles, financial and legal documents in six languages, Alvi explores these cultural and socio-economic developments across the British, French, and German markets, as well as trade spheres such as Russia and Scandinavia. 1914 marked the end of the European art market and cemented the connection between art and finance.  The European Art Market and the First World War: Art, Capital, and the Decline of the Collecting Class, 1910–1925 (Cambridge University Press, 2025) Maddalena Alvi holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, an MSc in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford, and an MLitt in Art History from the University of Glasgow. Priya S. Gandhi is a writer and strategist based in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France (Cornell UP, 2025) by Dr. Hannah Frydman reveals a space, hidden in plain sight in Third Republican Paris, where deviant sexualities and lives could be experimented with and financed, despite republican attempts at growing and norming the population through the heterosexual family. That space was the newspaper, which was not simply a tool of normalization and a site of "dominant discourse," as it has frequently been imagined. Reading between the lines, Dr. Frydman shows how, through the Belle Époque classifieds, the newspaper became a tool for living lives otherwise as information flowed from it not just vertically but also laterally, facilitating person-to-person communication. The sexual relationships, exchanges, and services enabled by this communication were far from utopian: Surviving and thriving outside of social norms often required exploiting others. Yet by attending to the lives and livelihoods enabled by the classifieds, ethical or otherwise, Between the Sheets demonstrates that, thanks to new innovations in media technologies, queer and nonnormative lives in this period were lived in the center as well as on the margins. It was this centrality, however, that inspired efforts to place new (moral) controls on mass cultural forms and technologies. After World War I, in an interwar moment often characterized as one of sexual liberation, the press's queerness was subjected to ever-increasing surveillance and control, with repercussions for press freedom writ large. These repercussions echo into our age of social media, with its promise of unfettered connection, which inspires repressive legislation to keep sexuality (and with it, freedom) in its crosshairs. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies