Guests

Since graduating from Ohio State University Robert Buzzanco has written or edited three books on the Vietnam War and the American homefront. During this period his book Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era was published by Cambridge University Press and won the Stuart L. Bernath prize awarded by the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations. The companion book Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life is another fantastic work and one of the best books available on the American homefront during this period.

He currently hosts his own podcast the Red and Green Podcast for “scrappy radicals, environmentalists, anti-capitalists, people tired of this system, and anyone who’s angry about anything going on in politics and the economy.”

Dr. Clavin is a professor at the University of Houston. He is the author of multiple books on slavery and the abolitionist movement in the Atlantic world. His works include: Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution, Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers, and The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community.

Dr. Joan DeJean has been Trustee Professor at the University of Pennsylvania since 1988. She previously taught at Yale and at Princeton. She is the author of twelve books on French literature, history, and material culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including “The Invention of Paris: Making the City Modern” (2014);  “The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual and the Modern Home Began” (2009); “The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour” (2005). She grew up in southwest Louisiana, in a family and a town in which Louisiana’s French past was the stuff of daily life.  For over thirty years, she has divided her time between Philadelphia and Paris, where she has always worked in the very archives in which, in 2016, she happened upon the story of the women banished/deported to Louisiana in 1719. Her book Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast tells the remarkable story of early 18th century women exiled to Louisiana. 

Dr. Richard Derderian earned his PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He worked at the National University of Singapore and California Lutheran University. His book North Africans in Contemporary France: Becoming Visible covers the culture of French Algerians within France following the Algerian War. His podcast Realms of Memory features the insights of leading experts on how countries around the globe confront their most difficult and often traumatic histories.

Dr. Annabelle Dolidon

• Post-WW2 French Science Fiction with Prof. Annabelle Dolidon

Mike Duncan

• Hero of Two World Worlds with Mike Duncan

Dr. Bonnie Effros

• French imperialism, Roman ruins & Algeria with Dr. Bonnie Effros

Dahlia El Zein

• Imperial Connections: Syria, Lebanon and French West Africa with Dahlia El Zein

Arazoo Ferozan is a Ph.D candidate at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Her work focuses on Mediterranean cross-cultural mercantile networks in the early modern period. Her most recent presentations have focused on the city of Marseille as a nodal point for economic and cultural connections.

After graduating from Harvard University, Dr. Fishman went to France where she interviewed wives of French prisoners of war for her first book We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War 1940 to 1945. From her position at the University of Houston she transitioned to studying juvenile delinquency under Vichy for her 2002 book The Battle for Children: World War Two Youth, Crime and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth Century France. Her most recent work From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender, Marriage and Family in France 1945 to 1965 moves beyond Vichy and examines how women and children’s lives changed after liberation. I could spend an hour just reading through her CV. So for now I’ll just say she’s very accomplished. In addition to her prolific work on modern French women she co-authored the book France and Its Empire Since 1870 with Alice Conklin and Robert Zaretsky, two major figures in modern French studies.

David A. Foulk received his licence & masters from Bordeaux Montaigne before pursuing a DPhil at Oxford University. He currently studies the economic aspect of the French Resistance during WW2 & has won numerous awards for his research, including from the Royal Historical Society. 

The impact of the “economy of history”: The example of battlefield tourism in France –Mondes du tourisme, 2016 

Dr. Leland Renato Grigoli

• Cistercian Monks, the Albigensian Crusade, and the French Conquest of Occitania by Leland Renato Grigoli

Sophie Higgerson is a PhD student in the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. Her research focuses primarily on the architecture and urbanism of French and German border spaces, socio-political identity in aesthetic movements, and critical heritage studies. She has previously held internships at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Strasbourg and the Library of Congress, where she catalogued the library’s collection of 18th century French legal documents and researched the enforcement of the salt tax in pre-Revolutionary France.

Patrick Higgins is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Houston. He is working on a history of US imperialism in West Asia, primarily in Palestine. This dissertation project focuses on Palestinian and Arab revolutionary perceptions of US imperialism in the Arab world from the 1950s to the early 1970s, and how those perceptions shaped theory and strategy around the Palestinian cause. He holds an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from University of Texas at Austin and a BA from Wayne State University. He has shared his work as a Fellow at the 2019 Middle East Political Economy Summer Institute.

 

 

Michelle Chun-Han Hsu

• French Melodrama and Chinese Politics by Michelle Chun-Han Hsu

Michelle is a DPhil student in French from the University of Oxford. She is working on a thesis titled Gender and Empire in Turn-of-the-Century French Literature on China under the supervision of Prof Jennifer Yee. Her project thinks of China as both a declining (but potentially rival) empire and a museum of beauty, cruelty, and ancient practices which occupied a unique and contradictory place in the imagination of fin-de-siècle France. Gender and empire function as a co-productive framework for French and Francophone writers to negotiate differences, fulfil political or religious agenda, and identify springboards for creative writing. Key authors include Victor Segalen, George Soulié de Morant, Paul Claudel, Judith Gautier, and Pierre Loti.

Prior to her doctoral studies, she completed a Master’s degree in Littératures: théorie, histoire at the École normale supérieure in Paris, an MSt in Modern Languages at Oxford, and a BA in Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. Alongside academic work, Michelle is also a translator. She has translated Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London by Lauren Elkin from English into Mandarin and Histoire des larmes: XVIIIe-XIXe siècles by Anne Vincent-Buffault from French into Mandarin.

Website

Dr. Ethan Katz

• Jews and Jewish-Muslim relations in France, 1940-2019 with Dr. Ethan Katz

Professor Katz is an Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book was The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France published by Harvard University Press in 2015.

New in French translation: Juifs et musulmans en France: le poids de la fraternité

Website: www.ethankatz.net

Dr. Emma Kavanagh

• Notre-Dame in Adaptation: Louise Bertin’s La Esmeralda by Emma Kavanagh

• Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, read by Dr. Emma Kavanagh

Emma is a recieved her doctorate in Musicology at the University of Oxford, where she was the inaugural Louis Curran scholar at Linacre College. She holds a BA from the University of Cambridge, and an MA from the University of Nottingham. Emma’s research interests focus on opera and musical culture in France in the long nineteenth century. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis, “Masculinity and the Other in French Belle Époque Opera, 1870-1914”. Emma has a recent chapter published in “The East, The West, The In-Between in Music” from the Münchner Veröffentlichungen zur Musikgeschichte. She has won awards such as the European Regional Prize in the Music, Theatre and Film category at The Global Undergraduate Awards, the University of Nottingham’s Bernard Slee Prize, and a Thomas Lincare Studentship.

Aaron Kestle

• French Mythmaking of King Arthur by Aaron Kestle

Aaron Kestle is a Ph.D. candidate in his fifth year in the Yale University French Department. He is currently preparing a dissertation examining the marvelous in medieval Arthurian literature, specifically in the Huth Merlin or the Roman de Merlin and the Post Vulgate Suite. His work centers around the figure of Merlin, both the evolution of the literary character and his representation in late twelfth and early thirteenth century French romance. His interests also incorporate a broad spectrum of medieval language and literature, including but not limited to Insular Latin sources for Arthurian lore, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Middle Welsh romance. Today, he has prepared a short overview of early Arthurian literature and historical sources, exploring the frequent literary exchanges between the continent and the British Isles that are characteristic of the genre.

Dr. Catherine Kudlick

• Disability and Disease in 19th Cent. Paris with Dr. Catherine Kudlick

After two decades at the University of California, Davis, Catherine Kudlick became Professor of History and Director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University in 2012. She has published a number of books and articles in disability history, including Reflections: the Life and Writings of a Young Blind Woman in Postrevolutionary France and “Disability History: Why We Need Another Other” in the American Historical Review. She oversaw completion of Paul Longmore’s posthumously published book, Telethons: Spectacle, Disability, and the Business of Charity and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Disability History with Michael Rembis and Kim Nielsen. As director of the Longmore Institute, she directed the public history exhibit “Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights” and co-hosts Superfest International Disability Film Festival. Her current work blends research and advocacy in the service of public history where the major goal is pursuing the Longmore Institute’s mission to convince the world that society is better because of disabled people.

Michael J. LaMonica

• French ‘Corsairing’ in the Americas during the War of the Spanish Succession by Mike LaMonica

Michael LaMonica is a doctoral student at McGill University specialising in French Atlantic history. Specifically, his research focuses on the intersection of law, commerce, and empire in the 17th and 18th-century Atlantic world. He had previously worked as an attorney and is the author of two books: the French Revolutions for Beginners and the First Amendment for Beginners. His dissertation examines the workings of the admiralty courts in the French colonies and how these courts aided in the construction of trans-Atlantic legal space.

Ainan Liu

• Political Crisis in Racine’s Phèdre by Ainan Liu

Ainan is a PhD candidate from the French and Italian Department at Princeton University. His research interest lies in French theater in the early modern period. His current work focuses on 17^th century playwright Jean Racine’s tragedies, in particular the reinvention of his classical sources.

 

Iain MacGregor

• France in Occupied Berlin with Iain MacGregor

As an editor and publisher of nonfiction, Iain MacGregor has over twenty-five years’ experience of working with authors such as Bruce Springsteen, Simon Schama, David Grann, Bob Wioodward and Max Hastings, to name but a very few. He is currently a publisher for the Hachette Publishing – one of France’s biggest media groups. His book A cycling fanatic, Iain is also the author of To Hell on a Bike-Riding Paris-Roubaix, The Toughest Race in Cycling. His book Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place On Earth released to critical acclaim. 

Taylor Marrow

• African American Soldiers in France with Taylor Marrow

Taylor Marrow was born and raised in Princeton, New Jersey and attended some of the best public schools in the nation which gave him an appreciation for education. He then attended Indiana University Bloomington and earned a B.A. with a double major in History and telecommunications. He then acquired an M.A. in history from Ball State where he specialized in 20th century U.S. history and a minor in interwar Europe. In fall 2004 his first book was published Reconciling the Past: A Brief History of Race Relations in Muncie, Indiana. Since then he has consistently worked on the history of race relations in the United States. Aside from academics, Taylor has lived an incredible life traveling around the country with a band, bartending, managing a restaurant and leading brown bags at Chemeketa Community College where he hosts conversations on social issues.

Dr. Kathleen McCrudden Illert

• Sophie de Grouchy: The most interesting French Revolutionary you’ve never heard of by Kathleen McCrudden Illert

Dr. Kathleen McCrudden Illert is an intellectual historian of eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. She is particularly interested in how to recover and reconstruct the ideas of past thinkers, especially women, who are typically excluded from the traditional political-philosophical canon. Currently, Kathleen’s research focuses on the period around the French Revolution, and she is writing a book about the political thought and activities of Sophie de Grouchy (1763-1822), the wife of the marquis de Condorcet. Her most recent article appeared in French History, and explores Condorcet’s take on the famous 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme. Kathleen received her PhD from Yale University, having gained an MPhil and BA from the University of Cambridge. Her thesis was awarded the Hans Gatzke Prize for an outstanding dissertation in the field of European History. She is currently a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. 

 

 

Marie Martine

• Rediscovering Georges de Peyrebrune by Marie Martine

Marie Martine is a PhD student at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on women writers from the end of the nineteenth century in France, Germany, and Norway. Her thesis looks at how those writers have responded to contemporary discourses around women’s sexuality and mental health, notably in naturalist fiction. Before her PhD, she did her masters in German and Comparative Literature at the universities of Bonn and St Andrews. She has a bachelor's degree in Franco-German studies from the universities of La Sorbonne and of Bonn, in Germany.

 

Matthew McDonald

• Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte by Matthew McDonald

Matthew McDonald is a PhD candidate in European History at Princeton University. He is a scholar of the history of the French language, with a particular interest in how European elites spoke French in countries like Germany, Sweden, and Russia during the Old Regime. You can find out more about his project and his recent publications by visiting his web page hosted by the Princeton University Department of History.

Dr. Rachel Mesch

• Before Trans: Three Incredible Lives with Dr. Rachel Mesch

Dr. Rachel Mesch received her BA from Yale College (1993), her MA from Columbia University (1995), and her Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania (2000). She specializes in 18th-20 century French gender studies and women writers. She has published three books: The Hysteric’s Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle (2006), Having it All in the Belle Epoque: How French Women Writers Invented the Modern Woman (2013), and Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Ninteenth-Century France (2020). 

Sarah Miles

• The Merchant of Revolution with Sarah K. Miles

Sarah K. Miles is a graduate student in history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her dissertation examines radical leftist networks in the francophone Atlantic world, focusing in particular on France, Quebec, Algeria, and the francophone Caribbean. She is interested in the role of publications and intellectuals in fostering transnational solidarity between revolutionary organizations in the late twentieth century.

Dr. Chris Millington

• France and its Empire during World War 2 with Dr. Chris Millington

• The French Far Right in the 1920-1930s with Dr. Chris Millington

• Massacre at Clichy! with Dr. Chris Millington

Dr. Millington is a Reader in Modern European History at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author of five books on twentieth-century France, notably Fighting for France: Violence in Interwar French Politics (2018) and A History of Fascism in France (2019). His sixth book, Massacre à Clichy, is the first to investigate the antifascist Clichy riot of March 1937; it will be published in French in 2021. He is currently working on terrorism in interwar and wartime France.

Celine Mitchell

• Remembering the Algerian War through Hip-Hop

Celine is a third-year PhD candidate at The London School of Economics (LSE). She is writing a contemporary history of the French Algerian youth, through the lens of hip-hop. In particular, her work focuses on the analysis of the second and third generation’s engagement with historical, political and socio-economic themes in their music.

Celine received a first-class undergraduate degree in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Manchester, and a master’s degree from LSE in International History. Her master’s dissertation, “French Algerian Hip-Hop: Colonialism, The Civil War and the Homeland” won LSE’s Medlicott Prize for the best dissertation in the History Department.

Between her studies, Celine has worked with young people as a youth mentor and teacher. Having worked at the BBC for a short time, she is also interested in journalism and documentary filmmaking, and has been working on a few film projects alongside her thesis.

Dr. Robin Mitchell

• Black Venus: African Women in 19th Century France

Dr. Robin Mitchell is an assistant professor of history at California State University Channel Islands. She received her M.A. from the University of California Santa Cruz, and her Ph.D from UC Berkeley. Her book Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2020 to critical acclaim. The book explores how black women reflected and embodied colonial French anxieties from the late Ancién Regime into the 19th century.

Keira Morgan

• Four Royal Women’s Entangled Lives by Keira Morgan

When Keira was five, her grandmother gave her a book about England’s queens, which started a lifelong fascination. She went on to complete her B.A. in History and English and an M.A. in History, at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She spent the next few decades working in a number of professions, all while writing historical fiction.

Now a retiree, she is pursuing her writing dream full-time. Since 2019, she’s published three articles in local expat newsletters and a short story in an anthology. While searching for an agent for her first novel, she is writing a second, also set in Renaissance France. She also writes non-fiction biographies for her website Keira Morgan — Renaissance Fiction Writer, which she plans to collect in a book about Women of the French Renaissance.

Justine Picardie

• Miss Dior with Justine Picardie

Justine Picardie on her new book: Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture, which explores the life and world of Catherine Dior. Justine Picardie is the former features director of British Vogue, editor of the Observer magazine and has worked as a fashion columnist for Harper’s Bazaar and the Times of London. She is also an award-winning author of books such as If The Spirit Moves You, My Mother’s Wedding Dress: The Life and Afterlife of Clothes, and Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life, among others

Robert Pike

• Silent Village with Robert Pike

Robert Pike is currently a PhD student at Cardiff University. He graduated from the University of Exeter, where he studied History and French, in 1998. His doctoral research is entitled ‘An Interdisciplinary Approach to Rural Resistance in Nazi-Occupied France’. He is also author of two books about occupied France. 

Robert taught both French and History for a decade in secondary schools and co-authored many commercially available courses for learners of the French language, including Oxford University Press’ successful A-level French course.

Twitter

Personal Website

Dr. Lauren Quigley

• Navigating Paris: What’s the flâneur got to do with it?

Lauren Quigley is a PhD candidate in French Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, Ireland. Her project consists of an interdisciplinary study in French Studies and Architecture entitled ‘Parisian Poiesis: Architecture and the Aesthetics of Contemporary French Poetry’. The thesis explores the relationship between aesthetics, architecture, and form in the poetry of Jacques Réda, Jacques Roubaud and Michel Houellebecq. On a broader scale, her research interests lie in poetry (from nineteenth-century to contemporary works), the intersection of literature and architecture, the city of Paris, aesthetics, architectural history, urbanism, mobilites, and visual culture, especially street art.

Twitter

 

Dr. Lyz Renshaw

• France and the Silver Screen

Lyz received her Ph.D. from Michigan Technological University where she studyied rhetoric theory and culture with a focus on media studies particularly narrative, narratology, feminism and video game theory.

Matt Robertshaw

• Haitians in French Colonial Africa by Matt Robertshaw

Matt Robertshaw is a PhD candidate in History at York University in Toronto. He is studying the relationship between Haiti and the later French colonial empire in Africa. He is also a video essayist, sharing original research on sport, language and popular culture in the colonial and post-colonial world via Sleeper Hit History on YouTube.

 

Links:

Youtube: youtube.com/sleeperhithistory

Twitter: @mattjrobertshaw

 

 

Olivier Robichaud

• The Origins of the French Language by Olivier Robichaud

• The Old French Language with Olivier Robichaud

Olivier is the news editor for Métro, a daily newspaper based in Montreal, Canada. His main specialties are local news, municipal politics and the law. Olivier has also studied sociolinguistics, specifically the variation of French across time and space.

 

Dr. Tara Sewell-Lasater

• Napoleon, Egypt and the Birth of Modern Egyptology with Dr. Tara Sewell-Lasater

Tara Sewell-Lasater graduated from the University of Houston in 2020 with a PhD in History. Her research focuses on Hellenistic Egypt, numismatics, and gender, specifically exploring the roles open to royal women in Ptolemaic Egypt and the expressions of female power on coinage. Her dissertation “Becoming Kleopatra: Ptolemaic Royal Marriage, Incest, and the Path to Female Rule,” provides the first overarching and comparative study of Hellenistic Egyptian queens, from the origins of the dynasty to the final ruler, Kleopatra VII.

Website

Dr. Steve Shone

• Louise Michel & the Radical Women of the 19th Century with Dr. Steve Shone

Steve J. Shone received his Ph.D. from the University of California-Riverside in 1992. He has taught at a number of colleges, including Winona State University, Gonzaga University, and the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley. He is the author of Lysander Spooner: American Anarchist and American Anarchism. He was a contributor to The SAGE Handbook of Human Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery. His new book, Women of Liberty is a study of the ideas of ten radical, feminist, and anarchist thinkers: Tennie C. Claflin, Noe Itō, Louise Michel, Rose Pesotta, Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mollie Steimer, Lois Waisbrooker, Mercy Otis Warren, and Victoria C. Woodhull.

Jo Teeuwisse aka 'The Fake History Hunter

• French History Myths with the Fake History Hunter, Jo Teeuwisse

After a career in film & television Jo realised her passion lay elsewhere, shut down her company and became a full time historian specialised in daily life in medieval and 1920s-1940s Europe. She spent the last 2 decades doing research for museums, authors, documentaries, tv drama, movies and has worked in several museums as an educator, exhibit creator and more. Today she runs the popular Fake History Hunter website which exposes fake history online.

Adrian van der Velde

• Nighttime in the 18th century French Caribbean with Adrian van der Velde

Adrian van der Velde is a PhD candidate in early modern Atlantic World and European history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation, entitled “When Unwelcome Night Came,” examines the role of nocturnality in the British, Dutch, and French Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Via the categories of mobility, religion, sociability, technology and production, and violence, his work employs a cultural methodology to explore the ways that people discussed and experienced the night and applies it as a lens to see the way that marginalized people—especially the enslaved—could use it to resist colonial authority.

Darah Vann Orr

• #MeToo and Roman Rape Culture with Darah Vann Orr

Dr. Darah Vann Orr received her Ph.D. from the University of Houston, studying Women, Gender, and Sexuality of the Early Roman Empire. Her dissertation, ‘Rape and Imperialism: Rome’s Violent Conquest of Land and Bodies,’ seeks to explain how the Romans associated sexual violence with warfare. 

Dr. Kate Vigurs

• Women Secret Agents in WW2 with Dr. Kate Vigurs

Dr. Kate Vigurs is a professional freelance historian who received her PhD from the University of Leeds. Vigurs is a tour guide for Anglia Tours, covering the Western Front battlefields, Berlin and Krakow, Auschwitz, and has recently done consultancy work for the Army Museums, Ogilvy Trust and South Yorkshire Aircraft Museum. Vigurs also has her own live historical interpretation company Histories Made and regularly produces scripts, films and live performances for organizations such as English Heritage, Royal Armories, National Army Museum, RAF Museum and Imperial War Museums. Histories Made covers a wide variety of historical periods, and Vigurs interests encompass everything from the Romans to the Cold War, but especially medieval and the world wars. Her book, Mission France: The True History of the Women of the SOE is an exciting and scholarly work detailing the 39 women hired by the British Special Operations Executive to perform undercover work in France during World War Two. These remarkable women sabotaged German equipment, organized the maquis, relayed vital information to the Allies and even killed enemy combatants. 

Dr. Cameron Zinsou

• The Phoney War with Cameron Zinsou

Dr. Cameron Zinsou received his Ph.D from Mississippi State University and is currently teaching at High Point University. His dissertation, “Occupied: The Civilian Experience in Montélimar, 1939-1945,” received the Allan R. Millet Dissertation Research Fellowship in 2017 from the Society for Military History. His article “The Forgotten Story of Operation Anvil” appeared in The New York Times.