French Presse: New Books on French and Francophone History. Bring your own coffee!
This virtual series of hour-long book talks typically feature an author with a relatively new publication in French and/or Francophone history (publication date of current or previous year) and an interviewer familiar with the subject matter. A moderator handles Zoom entry and takes additional questions from the audience.
We actively seek proposals for pairs of authors-interviewers that would include the title and publication information of the book, short CVs, and a list of potential themes for discussion.
We are committed to creating a welcoming, antiracist, and diverse series that embodies our Society’s anti-discriminatory mission of inclusiveness, political education, and equitable empowerment.
French Presse 2026
Sunday, January 25, 3pm ET
In our next French Presse Alice Conklin will be in conversation with Dan Sherman about his book Sensations: French Archaeology between Science and Spectacle, 1890-1940, published last spring by University of Chicago Press. Sensations explores how the archaeological profession took shape in France and the continuing and formative tension between its scientific aspirations and its craving for media attention. It spotlights two controversies, one over official archaeology in Tunisia in the early years of the French Protectorate (1881-1956); the other over what seemed to be a dramatic Neolithic horde of tablets, cult objects, and ceramics unearthed in the Auvergne in the 1920s, which became the celebrated Glozel Affair. Sensations considers a wide variety of topics, including the networks of colonial science, the performative dimensions of discipline formation, the notion of an archaeological archive, and the role of technology (such as photography) in visualizing the past.
This promises to be a lively and illuminating conversation between two accomplished historians of France and the French empire. Both historians are also interested in and reflective about the relationships between historians’ selves and their subjects. As Dan has said in another interview, “I don’t think I had realized, even though this is my fourth book, how my own subjectivity, properly managed, could help me write a more interesting book.”
Want a sense of the subject? Check this out.
Daniel Sherman is Lineberger Distinguished Professor of Art History and History at UNC Chapel Hill. His previous books include The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (1999), winner of the J. Russell Major and Wylie Prizes, and French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945-75 (2011), winner of the Pinkney and Heggoy Prizes.
Alice Conklin, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State, is the author of A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (1997), winner of the Berkshire Prize, and of In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (2013), winner of the Pinkney Prize and the Senior Book Prize from the Ohio Academy of History.
No preparation required, just come and listen.
You must register for the event using Eventbrite.
If you have problems, please email Judy Coffin (jcoffin@austin.utexas.edu) or Sally Charnow (sally.d.charnow@hofstra.edu).
French Presse 2025
French Presse – spring 2025 (Sign-up with Zoom link will be announced approximately one week in advance of the meeting)
January 26th – Elise Franklin, Disintegrating Empire: Algerian Family Migration and the Limits of the Welfare State in France (Nebraska, 2024) In conversation with Emily Marker, Rutgers University
February 16th - Tamara Chaplin, Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France (U Chicago, 2024) In conversation with Andrew Israel Ross, Loyola
March 9th - Terry Peterson, Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency (Cornell UP, 2024) In conversation with Drew Flannigan, University of Pittsburgh
April 20th - Laura Mason, The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals (Yale UP, 2022). In conversation with Charles Walton, University of Warwick
May 11th - Julie Fette, Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature (Routledge, 2024) and, Sophie Heywood, Children’s Publishing in Cold War France: Hachette in the Age of Surveillance and Control (Bloomsbury, Perspectives in Children’s Literature series, February 2025) In conversation with each other!
French Presse 2024
Sunday, January 21, 2024 at 3 PM EST
Emily Marker and Todd Shepard will discuss Marker’s prize-winning book, Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era.
Sunday, March 3, 2024 at 3 PM EST
Graduate Student Showcase Edition (in conjunction with Hofstra 2024)
Moderated by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of the History Department at California State University, San Marcos
Sunday, May 5, 2024
Yan Slobodkin in conversation with Madeline Woker on Yan’s book The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France’s Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2023).