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PODCAST

New Books in French Studies

Interviews with Scholars of France about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

society & culture

All Episodes

41:30

Julie Fette, "Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/11/07

Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature (Routledge, 2025) investigates the gender representations that French children's literature transmits to readers today. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, this book grounds its literary analysis in a sociohistorical examination of three key institutions – libraries, book clubs, and subscription magazines – that circulate reading material to children. It shows how French policies, cultural beliefs, and market forces

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55:19

Sarah Griswold, "Resurrecting the Past: France's...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/11/03

In Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate (Cornell UP, 2025), Dr. Sarah Griswold shows how the Levant became a crucial front in a post-1918 fight over the French past—a contingent and contradictory but always hard-charging struggle over a forgotten "heritage mandate." Many scholars, clergy, pundits, politicians, and investors perceived the moment Allied forces entered Jerusalem in December 1917 to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand French influence, evoking the vision

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47:07

Kathryn Robson, "Beyond the Happy Ending: Imagining...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/10/22

In Kathryn Robson's Beyond the Happy Ending: Imagining Happiness in Contemporary French Women's Writing and Film (Liverpool UP, 2025), happiness (and the question of how to define, measure and facilitate it) has become a key theme in political, economic and social discourses in recent decades in France and elsewhere, yet research on happiness in French culture and film has been limited. Given that happiness is clearly gendered, this book looks critically at the ways in which contemporary French

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39:17

Maurice Samuels, "Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/10/21

On January 5, 1895, Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s cries of innocence were drowned out by a mob shouting “Death to Judas!” In Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair (Yale UP, 2024), Maurice Samuels gives readers new insight into Dreyfus himself—the man at the center of the affair. He tells the story of Dreyfus’s early life in Paris, his promising career as a French officer, the false accusation leading to his imprisonment on Devil’s Island, the fight to prove his innocence that divided the

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66:22

Paul Galvez, "Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/10/20

Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cézanne. This series has long been neglected in favor of Courbet’s paintings of rural French life. Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting (Yale UP, 2022) explores these astonishing paintings, staking a claim for their importance to Courbet’s work and later developments in French modernism. Ranging from the grottoes of Courbet’s native

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19:09

William Doyle, "Napoleon at Peace: How to End a...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/10/19

The French Revolution facilitated the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after gaining power he knew that his first task was to end it. In this book William Doyle describes how he did so, beginning with the three large issues that had destabilized revolutionary France: war, religion, and monarchy. Doyle shows how, as First Consul of the Republic, Napoleon resolved these issues: first by winning the war, then by forging peace with the Church, and finally by making himself a monarch. Napoleon at Peace:

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73:05

Gianna Englert, "Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/10/15

Does good democratic government require intelligent, moral, and productive citizens? Can our political institutions educate the kind of citizens we wish or need to have? With recent arguments "against democracy" and fears about the rise of populism, there is growing scepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive together. Some even question whether democracy is worth saving.In Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage (Oxford UP, 2024), Gianna

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31:50

Madeleine Chalmers, "French Technological Thought and...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/10/13

French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) traces a genealogy of thinking and writing about technology, which takes us from the French avant-gardes to the contemporary 'nonhuman turn' in Anglo-American theory via the Surrealists, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze.Tracking the unruly transition from Catholic vocabularies of grace, potentiality, and actuality to the modern and contemporary secular lexicon of agency, virtuality, and affect, this book

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70:46

Daniel J. Sherman, "Sensations: French Archaeology...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/10/09

In this episode, Sarah talks to Daniel J. Sherman about his most recent book, Sensations: French Archaeology Between Science and Spectacle, 1890-1940 (U Chicago Press, 2025). Sensations is a history of the early years of professional archaeology in France through two controversies – the first in Carthage in what the French protectorate of Tunisia and the second in the small rural community of Glozel in central France. The book shows how “archaeology as we know it today grew out of a fundamental

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53:33

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/10/08

In the decades leading up to the French Revolution, when Paris was celebrated as an oasis of liberty, slaves fled there, hoping to be freed. They pictured Paris as a refuge from France’s notorious slave-trading ports.The French were late to the slave trade, but they dominated the global market in enslaved people by the late 1780s. This explosive growth transformed Paris, the cultural capital of the Enlightenment, into a dangerous place for people in bondage. Those seeking freedom in Paris faced

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71:17

Justine De Young, "The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/10/06

Using artworks by Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and others, The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern Women and Modern Artists in Impressionist Paris (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Justine De Young explores how women and artists in Impressionist Paris (1855-1885) crafted their public images to exploit and resist stereotypes.French societal expectations and beauty ideals shaped how women were seen and how they chose to present themselves in public – whether on the street, in a

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49:29

Michelle Bumatay, "On Black Bandes Dessinées and...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/10/03

On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power (The Ohio State UP, 2025) is the first book-length study in English about Black francophone cartoonists and their work. Author Michelle Bumatay decenters Eurocentric conceptions of francophone comic art and foregrounds the ubiquity of Western racial stereotypes encoded in mainstream French and Belgian bandes dessinées as well as the imbalance of power between the Global North and the Global South carried over from the colonial era. By examining a

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51:51

Eric T. Jennings, "Vanilla: The History of an...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/10/02

Vanilla is one of the most expensive of flavorings—so valuable that it was smuggled or stolen by pirates in the early days—and yet it is everywhere. It is a key ingredient in dishes ranging from crème brûlée to Japanese purin. It is the quintessential ice cream flavor in the United States. In Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean (Yale UP, 2025) Dr. Eric T. Jennings explains how the world’s only edible orchid, originally endemic to Central America, became embedded in the international

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73:03

Matt Myers, "The Halted March of the European Left:...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/09/30

The European left seemed to be in rude health during the 1970s. Never had so many political parties committed to representing the working class been in power simultaneously across the continent. New forms of mobilisation led by female, immigrant, and young wage-earners seemed to reflect the growing strength of the workers' movement rather than its pending obsolescence. Parties and trade unions grew rapidly as a diverse new generation entered the ranks. Why did the left's forward march halt so

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61:10

Todd McGowan, "The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/09/29

The difficulty of Jacques Lacan's thought is notorious. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan cuts through this difficulty to provide a clear, jargon-free approach to understanding it. The book describes Lacan's life, the context from which he emerged, and the reception of his theory. Readers will come away with an understanding of concepts such as jouissance, the objet a, and the big Other. The book frames Lacan's thought in the history of philosophy and explains it through jokes, films, and

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43:23

Natacha Chetcuti-Osorovitz and Sara Garbagnoli "La...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/09/26

How is it possible to be a subject when faced with oppression? The revolutionary thought and work of French novelist and lesbian thinker Monique Wittig are today in dialogue with feminist and LGBTQIA+ analyses and politics. Her materialist theorization of lesbianism subfuses contemporary feminism and queer political and social movements. By proposing a detailed analysis of heterosexuality as a total political regime, Wittig as a theorist, writer, and activist opens up the possibility of a world

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56:17

I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/09/18

“My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery,” declared Jean‑Jacques Dessalines as he announced the independence of Haiti, the most radical nation‑state during the Age of Revolution and the first country ever to permanently outlaw slavery. Enslaved for the first thirty years of his life, Dessalines (c. 1758–1806) joined the revolution that abolished slavery within the French colony. Then he became a general in the colonial army of the new French Republic. When it was discovered that

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61:55

Alex R. Tipei, "Unintended Nations: How French...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/09/15

In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, French liberals set out to create an informal empire. Their efforts to cultivate unequal partnerships with Christian, Greek-speaking elites in southeast Europe shaped national identities and structured global civilizational hierarchies over the decades that followed.Unintended Nations: France’s Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025) tracks a notion of civilization that developed in

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66:48

Kevin Passmore, "The Maginot Line: A New History of...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/09/13

The Maginot Line was a marvel of 1930s engineering. The huge forts, up to eighty meters underground, contained hospitals, modern kitchens, telephone exchanges, and even electric trains. Kilometres of underground galleries led to casements hidden in the terrain, and turrets that rose from the ground to fire upon the enemy. The fortifications were invulnerable to the heaviest artillery and to chemical warfare.Despite this extensive preparation, France fell to Germany in a little under six weeks

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72:22

Laura Hobson Faure, "Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story...

New Books in French Studies ·

2025/09/12

The first account of Jewish children’s flight from Nazi Germany to France—and their subsequent escape to America from the Vichy regime At the eve of the Second World War, an estimated 1.6 million Jewish children lived in Nazi-occupied Europe. While 10,000 of them escaped to Britain in the Kindertransport, only some 500 found a new home in France. Here they attempted to begin again—but their refuge would all too soon become a trap.For the first time, Laura Hobson Faure brings to life the experiences

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