New Books in French Studies

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.

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Society & Culture
History
626
Gary Wilder, “Freedom Time: Negritude, Decoloni...
Gary Wilder‘s new book, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) builds upon the work he began in The French Imperial Nation State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Un...
59 min
627
Felicia McCarren, “French Moves: The Cultural P...
Felicia McCarren‘s latest book, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop (Oxford University Press, 2013) explores the fascinating evolution of this urban dance form in the French context. Following the choreography and performances of key figu...
9 min
628
David Meren, “With Friends Like These: Entangle...
In 1967, French President Charles de Gaulle cried out “Vive le Quebec libre!” from the balcony of Montreal’s City Hall. The controversial moment became a myth almost instantly. The four words De Gaulle uttered remain emblematic of an extremely importan...
60 min
629
Hugo Frey, “Nationalism and the Cinema in Franc...
Hugo Frey‘s new book, Nationalism and the Cinema in France: Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945-1995 (Berghahn Books, 2014) distinguishes between a national cinema (films made in France) and a nationalist cinema motivated by the specific agenda...
59 min
630
Tracy Leavelle, “The Catholic Calumet: Colonial...
68 min
631
Nicolas Kenny, “The Feel of the City: Experienc...
Nicolas Kenny‘s new book, The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation (University of Toronto Press, 2014) explores the sensory histories and urban development of Montreal and Brussels from the 1880s to 1914. We’ve read about Paris,
63 min
632
Carol E. Harrison, “Romantic Catholics: France’...
Since the political left and right first arose during the French Revolution, Catholics have been categorized as either conservatives or liberals, and most Catholics of the French nineteenth century are assumed to have been conservatives.
48 min
633
Michael Kwass, “Contraband: Louis Mandrin and t...
Michael Kwass‘s new book, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground is much more than an exciting biography of the notorious eighteenth-century smuggler whose name remains legendary in contemporary France.
60 min
634
Stephen L. Harp, “Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism,...
In the decades after the Second World War, France became the foremost nudist site in Europe. Stephen L. Harp‘s new book, Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France (Louisiana State University Press,
61 min
635
Ernest P. Young, “Ecclesiastical Colony: China’...
In theory, Christian missionaries plan only on working in a country until an indigenous leadership can take over management of the church. Theory is one thing, but practice is quite another, as Dr. Ernest P.
59 min
636
Cathy L. Schneider, “Police Power and Race Riot...
Cathy L. Schneider is the author of Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is associate professor in the School of International Service at American University.
27 min
637
John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Sci...
After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret modern European intellectual history as a prolonged st...
71 min
638
Kathrin Yacavone, “Benjamin, Barthes, and the S...
Kathrin Yacavone‘s Benjamin, Barthes, and the Singularity of Photography (Bloomsbury, 2013) is an engaging study that explores connections between two of the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century: Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Roland Bar...
2 min
639
Daniel Lee, “Petain’s Jewish Children: French J...
Daniel Lee‘s new book, Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942 (Oxford University Press, 2014) is highly compelling in its breadth, depth of research, and analysis. Focused on the social relationship between French...
60 min
640
Rebecca Rogers, “A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story...
In the early 1830s, the French school teacher Eugénie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around educational practices there, insisting that not only were women entitled to quality education,
30 min
641
John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Sci...
John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid nineteenth century. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicag...
71 min
642
John Protevi, “Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and th...
Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up new ways to conceptualize and ask questions of our objects of study.
66 min
643
Melanie C. Hawthorne, "Finding the Woman Who Di...
An interview with Melanie C. Hawthorne
27 min
644
Alice Conklin, “In the Museum of Man: Race, Ant...
Host Jonathan Judaken and author Alice Conklin discuss the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French imperialism and European fascism, as well as this neglected chapter in the international history of the...
29 min
645
Noah Shusterman, “The French Revolution: Faith,...
This year marks the 225th anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution. You don’t have to be a historian to know and appreciate how significant that revolution is to our understanding of French society and culture since the eighteenth century.
61 min
646
Mary Terrall, “Catching Nature in the Act” (Uni...
Mary Terrall‘s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the eighteenth-century francophone world. Catching Nature in the Act: Reaumur and the Practice of Natural His...
68 min
647
Clare Haru Crowston, “Credit, Fashion, Sex: Eco...
Anyone who’s been paying attention to the flurry around the French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century (Le Capital au XXIe siecle) knows how a la mode the economy is at the moment.
58 min
648
Miranda Spieler, “Empire and Underworld: Captiv...
54 min
649
Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeffrey H. J...
Believe it or not, the origins of this podcast and the entire New Books Network can be traced to a conversation I had in a cafein Ann Arbor, Michigan (Sweetwaters in Kerrytown, as it happens) in 2004. I was sitting there minding my own business when I ...
66 min
650
Ellen J. Amster, “Medicine and the Saints” (Uni...
What is the interplay between the physical human body and the body politic? This question is at the heart of Ellen J. Amster‘s Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 (University of Texas Press, 2013).
76 min