Program 2024-2025
All seminar meetings take place on Sundays, 5:00-7:00pm, unless otherwise noted.
September 8 at the National Humanities Center: Denis Provencher (NC State), Siham Bouamer (U Cincinnati), and Ryan Schroth (Wake Forest U) discussing the introduction to their book, Queer Realms of Memory: Archiving LGBTQ Sites and Symbols in the French National Narrative.
October 6 at the National Humanities Center: Ellen Welch (UNC, Chapel Hill) discussing a draft chapter from her book Common Noise: Listening Beyond the Public Sphere in Ancien Régime Literature. The chapter is tentatively titled “Noise in the Enlightenment: From Bruit to La Voix du peuple.”
November 17 exceptionally at 4 pm on Zoom: Susanna Caviglia (Duke) discussing a draft of a book chapter, “Marginalized Communities, Urban Reform, and Renovatio Urbis Romae,” from her current book project, The Foreigner’s Wandering Eye: Art, Mobility and Ecology in French Representations of Early Modern Rome (1580s-1780s).
January 26 on Zoom: Matthew Gin (UNC-Charlotte) discussing a draft chapter “Administering Ephemeral Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Paris” from his current book, Paper Monuments: The Politics of Ephemeral Festival Architecture in Enlightenment France.
February 23 at the National Humanities Center: Weixin Zhou (UNC, Chapel Hill) discussing a chapter of her dissertation, Designing Reconstruction: Architecture, French Society and the Working Class, 1945-1967. The chapter will discuss the housing policies of the newly established Ministry of Reconstruction and Urban Planning and some of its experimental housing projects after WWII.
March 23 at the National Humanities Center: Dore Bowen (Duke) discussing her paper “Animals, Monarchy, and Magic: Countermodernism and the Diorama in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Paris.” Focusing in on the diorama, it studies visual references to animals, monarchy, and magic in its painted tableaux, as well as atmospheric effects used to alter this imagery, and shows how these refer to countermodern politics. The paper then argues that these early paint-and-light dioramas informed the development of the habitat and anthropological diorama, such as those shown at the 1931 Colonial exhibition in Paris.
April 27 on Zoom: Sara Phenix (Brigham Young) discussing a draft chapter of her book, Bodice Politic: Fashion, Fiction & Fertility in Third Republic France.