WELCOME | BIENVENUE
Founded in 1954, the Society for French Historical Studies promotes scholarship focused on the history of France from the medieval era to the twenty-first century. The Society also champions research into history beyond France itself, to include the hexagon’s historical relationships with the rest of the world, including North America, Africa, and Asia, as well as other societies on the European continent.
The SFHS is very proud to publish the quarterly, French Historical Studies, long recognized internationally as one of the premier journals in the discipline of history.
Go to French Historical Studies
The annual meetings hosted by the SFHS have been particularly important venues for the dissemination of the highest quality research on French history in both English and French, and have offered countless opportunities for productive interchange and collaboration among scholars from the United States and Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, and beyond.
Tabetha Ewing, SFHS Executive Director Interviews Megan Brown, SFHS President
Megan is President of the Society for French Historical Studies and Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
Speaking as the Society’s Executive Director, I would introduce this interview by saying that we are truly excited to have Megan at the helm and increasingly grateful, as colleges and universities face this time of exceptional challenge, to have a person of Megan’s energy, youth, breathtaking talent, and humility working on our behalf. For us, for me, this has been ideal. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Megan’s Research
TE: Megan, could you first tell us a little bit about your research because that really is the basis of this relationship to the society.
MB: My first book, which came out of my dissertation, is on decolonization in European integration. And that book is called The Seventh Member State, Algeria, France, and the European Community.* And, in it, I argue that because of its juridical status, Algeria was named in the foundational document that created one of the precursors to the EU, and that had ramifications, even after Algeria's decolonization in 1962. My new project is, except for periodization, a bit of a left turn. I'm writing about a sex scandal in late 1950s, early 1960s Paris called L’Affaire des ballets roses, in which 23 adults, including three women, and including a recent president of the National Assembly, went to trial, accused of having debauched five girls and young women. And…it's a very twisty tale. It links to the death of a gendarme in the Bordeaux region during the liberation of France. It links to questions of the morality police of Paris in the interwar and wars. It brings out questions of sexuality, age of consent, and the law. And I've been sort of chipping away at the research on this fairly slowly since 2020 and I am just never bored thinking about it or talking about it.
*Published by Harvard University Press (2022). Winner, Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies (2025).
Megan’s Curriculum
TE: Tell us about your teaching. What do you teach as a rule, what do you choose to teach, what are you obliged to teach, what would you like to teach in future?
MB: Related to my teaching, I'm really excited that in the spring, for the first time I'm teaching a class that I think I titled Sex, Crimes, and Scandal. Those words are maybe not in that order, but it's going to be the kind of syllabus that helps me make the bibliography for this project. I think, you know, one of the pleasures of teaching out a small liberal arts college and one that gives us quite a bit of leeway and well and teach is that it's not the first time that I've been able to design a class that helps me directly to my own research and write my own work. Broadly, I teach modern European history. Yes, I have had a student complain that we are always talking about France. [Megan and Tabetha chuckle]. But again, there's a lot of freedom, even within the sort of service classes that I offer, in a survey of the 19th century, and a survey of the 20th century, I can always talk about empire. Nobody is questioning what I'm doing and that's a really great thing about where I'm placed and just that ability to think about European history and introduce my students to European history in the manner that I see to be the most engaging and also the closest to the types of research that colleagues are doing.
Fun Facts About Megan
TE: Okay, so tell me, or tell us, a little bit about something that you've read recently for fun. It could be a novel or a short story. Frankly, I don't even know why I'm sticking to print. It could be like something that just kind of grabbed you, that felt fun and was just generative in some way. Something that excited you.
MB: I recently finished a very long contemporary novel by a Dutch author in translation called The Remembered Soldier. The author is Anjet Daanje (translated by David McKay). It was astounding, and I really wish that I could find somebody else who had read it to talk about it with them. When it opens, we meet an amnesiac veteran of World War I, who lost his memory and had been found essentially wandering the battlegrounds five years prior, and it's the story of what happens when his wife comes to claim him at the asylum. And, you know, it's about World War I and it's about the interwar, and shell shock. It's about memory. I'd love to think of a way to incorporate it into my teaching. But I think that's something for way down the line. It's really astounding. Yet, it's also just about the nature of marriage and human relationships. So, anybody who wants to talk about it with me, I would love to talk about it with them. I haven't met anybody else who's read it yet, but the writing was really exquisite. It's very slow, but it builds on itself. And I think I might reread it, which I don't usually do to see what it would be like, knowing how it unfolds, to sort of think about the start of the novel again.
TE: I love that. I love it. And by strange coincidence, I have a close friend who is reading it now and told me the premise a few days ago.
Philly 2026 - The Conference
The Conference Theme
TE: Megan, as you know, one of the main things that the that the president of the society does, and specifically the presidents of our Society (which is quite different from other societies), is really focus on the event that brings us all together once a year, which is the annual conference. Of course, your intellectual leadership is always welcome throughout the year and will be welcome in the years to come. Tell us a little bit about the conference. In addition to the basic logistics, tell us about the theme and how the Program Committee came up with it. And I'm really interested in how the proposed papers may challenge or amplify the theme as you’d originally conceptualized it. I know that this is a special year for the nation-state. So maybe you could say a word about that as well.
MB: The conference is in Philadelphia. It's being held at the Old City Marriott on March 5th through 8th of 2026, and our theme is Liberties. The Program Committee has been doing outstanding work is right now going through the proposals: individual paper proposals, panel proposals, and round tables. And they found so many different ways that scholars have reacted to this theme and our engagement with it. Our program committee is chaired by Jess Pearson of McAllister and Owen White, at the University of Delaware, and they have gone above and beyond to find incredible connections between the really big range of proposals and ideas that have come to us. The approach to liberties has been a really, really varied and exciting, in intellectually stimulating ways. I'll say our keynotes, we have two keynote events, or plenary sessions. One is a conversation between François Furstenberg and Ashli White, focused on Atlantic Revolutions, and that's a way that we can think about broadly speaking on liberties, but grounded certainly in Atlantic Revolutions, mainly in, France, the U.S, and the Caribbean contexts. Our second plenary session is Jennifer Johnson, at Brown, and she'll be speaking on of her new research, which is about reproductive health at the dawn of independence in newly independent, formerly French colonial spaces. So, a very different way of thinking about liberties including questions of bodily autonomy and state sovereignty, and where those intersect. We have panels on the Haitian Revolution, panels on Franco-American connection, and panels on topics unrelated to liberties. I think overall, it shows us that we wanted a capacious theme where people would feel welcome to bring the research that they're actually doing and to think through questions that they actually care about. So, it's gone in many different directions. And that certainly was deliberate.
Local Arrangements and Special Events
MB: Obviously, the timing of the conference is also deliberate and fortuitous. It's the U.S. 250th anniversary. Philadelphia is a major hub of those celebrations and all sorts of reflections on what that means and then what sense. And the conference is going to great lengths to connect us to this historical moment. The Local Arrangements Committee is headed by Jacob Collins of the College of Staten Island, and we are forging connections with local museums and cultural institutions to offer optional tours on the Sunday morning, but also we know that every conference attendee will be able to visit the Museum of the American Revolution and also the Rosenbach free of charge just by showing their conference badge. So, these are ways to connect to Philly, to connect to Philly's history related to the revolution, and then also to see ways that Philly has a particularly strong connection with France, which we can see in Rosenbach's collections, but also in the Philadelphia Art Museums collections, in the Barnes, and the newly opened Calder Gardens. So, there are so many different m that that this is a different opening into liberties and rounding the conference and its history in the place, the place being Philly. America's wackiest and most wonderful city.
Connecting Research to Teaching
TE: This is really important. On so many levels. I wondered if there was going to be anything, not so much to do with pedagogy as with sort of syllabus creation or anything along those lines, that would assist our members in crafting courses that could develop out of the conference or the themes of the conference. I know that for me, sometimes knowing going in means that I can think a year ahead and think, okay, I could teach a course. And that might, in fact structure my decisions about which panels I attend. Anything along those lines?
MB: Definitely, I think there are a range of ways that the programming could serve in a classroom setting, and that would be whether somebody's teaching at a small liberal arts college like Swarthmore or is lecturing to 500 people or more, or is even doing online teaching. So one is that more and more of our colleagues, obligated to teaching U.S streak forces, which is not their graduate school training. added a most basic level, thanks to this really exciting sort of connection of the time period, and the location, we will have a lot of programming that is on Atlantic Revolutions, Atlantic History, U.S-France Connections, and War. And I think that it's a way in to make people feel more confident that their own trading and research interests does allow them to offer, you know, an authoritative voice in the classroom to teach students about U.S. history and to remember that U.S. history is also a global history and should taught as such, and that they should feel empowered to do so if they don't already.
MB, cont’d: We do have some more explicitly pedagogical sessions. One, which I will be moderating or chairing, will be, you know, French history in the small Liberal Arts classroom. So, there's that kind of programming as well. And then we have two fun programs that, while we're still sorting out the precise timing, we'll not have counterprogramming, so it's something that everybody can participate in. Jen Edwards of Manhattan University has written, and I believe this is her second “Reacting to the Past,” game. And so she'll be running a session teaching us and helping us to play “Reacting to the Past” and because of her own areas of research, it's going to be with a medieval focus. I think we'll get to be wayward nuns. I'm not totally certain. But it's an amazing teaching tool, and there are “Reacting to the Past” games for all sorts of time periods, so by using Jen's expertise, we'll be able to learn more about the teaching tool while we play in our own games.
MB, cont’d: And then yet another one is that we're going to have a session of Critical Karaoke. Folks who were in Detroit got to attend the critical karaoke session, and it really response. It was a hit, to put it mildly, and so I'm really excited to have another iteration of critical karaoke here, which is such a fun and different way for people to introduce their research in a deeply different type of presentation environment, but it's also the type of assignment that you in the classroom. [For example,] the History Department at Swarthmore will be inviting our senior majors to participate in political karaoke in the spring as a way of showcasing that their cone research assignments. Our research papers.
TE: I'm sorry to interrupt, but can you tell our readers? What is critical karaoke?
MB: Yeah, so if you google critical karaoke, there are different versions of it, so I'll only speak to the version that I got to see in Detroit, because that is the one that we will be most closely hewing to at our conference. So scholars choose a song, and it can be a contemporary pop song. It can have nothing to do on the face of it with their own research. And that song plays on a very low volume, and then the scholar, a presenter speaks over the song and only for the length of the song to use that song as a gateway to talk about their own research interests and their own research questions. So, among the many amazing participants in Detroit, Meghan Roberts, played a Taylor Swift song and talked about, I believe it was Voltaire's relationship to celebrity. It was an incredible, it was an incredible part of an incredible program, because it showed ways that we can connect our own research to contemporary questions. It also showed a way in to connect for students who may not be very interested in enlightenment on ideas about celebrity, you know, the Enlightenment in general, how we might draw students into it, or even just to use Taylor Swift in our own classroom to talk about the Enlightenment. And then also it showed ways that, you know, we can encourage students which we think about historical research as being fun and to make a presentation feel less stodgy. And so we will soon be putting out a call soliciting applicants, for lack of a better word, of who would like to participate in Critical Karaoke, and we're really excited for people at all stages of their research to think about submitting a song that they might like to present with.
TE: Very cool. I like the idea that we are expanding our formats. I know that I'll be checking in with you a little bit later about finding space for others of more intensive focus on individuals and their advanced research. In effect, we hope to support someone who's basically finished a manuscript with readers to help them to get it to the next stage and to publication. That said, having been in Seattle at an ACLS meeting this past weekend, I am increasingly concerned about the focus on (only) creating pipelines at our conferences to journal article and book publication -- in a moment when we're clearly trying to be more expansive in our reach. So, I love the idea that you are going to have this great event that isn't going to be competing with anything else, focusing on the classroom and more public-facing conveyances for our research, and on reaching out to younger potential scholars to consider how history matters in their world, and connects to their world.
Accommodations and Accessibility
TE, cont’d: So, we just have a couple more minutes, and I want to turn to some very practical questions. Oftentimes people ask me, “Why should I stay in the conference hotel?” Can you say a couple of words about why that's important?
MB: Yeah, so I'll start with the more, you know, the more boring answer, which is that the society, in order to contract the space for our meetings, also has to contractually agree to a room block. If we don't fill a certain percentage of the room block, meaning a group of rooms that the hotel has agreed to set aside for our membership at a special price. We can be penalized financially, and essentially charged for empty rooms. So, it's to the great financial detriment of the Society, if she needs fill the rooms that we have essentially committed to filling. And to that end, at a very pragmatic mall, sort of request for our membership and our attendees, we'll have the link to the room block’s specific reservation portal. When we accept papers, we'll make sure that people can see that ideally in the email itself and then also on our website, if somebody goes to the conference hotel’s normal registration page, they won't be using our room block, and so they would effectively be reserving a room, but not helping us as we to make sure we hit our numbers. So, it is truly a service to the society, to reserve using the word block. That said, we'd be delighted if people who would like to share rooms because that's more financially feasible, would do so, and we hope to be able to facilitate some of that, so there'll be more about that on the conference website.
MB, cont’d: The less sort of boring and pragmatic reason is that a lot of really nice connections happen over the ridiculously early breakfast. It can also be beneficial to have a little place that's private to take a pause, because conferences are so intense. I recognize how expensive it can feel when I was in grad school and did not have ample conference funding. I could not always say at a conference hotel. So, I would also ask that, for those of us who have conference funding, or the means to get a room of our own at the hotel, I would ask that they would consider offering to share with a scholar who may not be able to afford that, because that should not be a barrier for somebody participating in the conference.
TE: Yeah. And I think we have had certainly a tradition in the last several years of trying to be a responsive as possible to folks who either don't have funding at all or they're very early career. The Society, to the extent that we can, will always work toward greater inclusivity and our members have demonstrated the tendency to want to support one another. So, we'll put out a call later on to ask for anybody who wants to help with those of us who are underemployed or who are just starting out.
Day Passes?
TE, cont’d: Another practical question is, let's say I'm not giving a talk, as, for example, I have not submitted a proposal. Would I still be allowed to attend, if I wanted to come for one day?
MB: Absolutely. Yes, we'd be delighted to have people attend. I should have said, too, we will have a discounted rate for a graduate student and underemployed faculty, et cetera. So we really don't want there to be barriers to attendance, but we really welcome people to come just to learn and to hear things. Also, it's not too late. If somebody were able to use their conference funding or funding from their department only if their name were on the program, we certainly are still seeking Comment and Chair roles. So, volunteers for that are very welcome. So that's another way that people can still participate, especially if they feel like it's important for them to show their institution that they are actively conferencing at this moment when obviously, it's harder and harder to get that kind of funding. So, yes, we welcome people, even if it's just to listen, there's no problem at all.
TE: Okay. So, a last sort of practical issue is really, since you brought up the word accessibility, financial accessibility is one way of thinking about that, but there are other ways of thinking about access. And I just wondered if there's a little bit that you could say, is there anything that we can do? I mean, one of the things that I noticed that other societies do is, they have a way for participants to be in touch with one another. You know, somebody needs to be picked up with a car from the airport so that they are brought door to door without a problem. Someone traveling with an infant, for example, or someone low-seeing or hearing impaired who wants a friendly reception. Someone with food allergies might need supplies for their hotel room due to a late arrival and restrictions on travel with liquids. So there are a lot of ways we can support one another and I just wondered if there was anything like that on the radar?
MG: One thing that I've noticed at conferences that I think be sort of think about as a membership in general and it could also inform our teaching, is for those folks using slides to also say what is on the slide. And it doesn't need to take very long, but often, what I've seen people do is say, “as a point of visual access, this slide is showing a painting of a white woman lying on her side, and there's a black woman standing behind her who we are led to believe is an enslaved individual,” right. And it's not something that is talking down to anybody telling them how to understand it. It's just a way of making sure that, say, people who might have a visual impairment are able to participate and know what's going on. I think there's a long way to go, you know, some of us in our teaching, are very adept at making spaces accessible to our students, often with the help of very hard working and able student disability services. But I think that we are less accustomed to making our own colleagues feel that comfortable. I would encourage anybody who would feel like a physical or otherwise disability is a barrier to participation, to contact us at our email address:
And, you know, if it's a question of making sure that a car is there, that might be something little full arrangements, can assist with. Philly is pretty easy to navigate. Philly is not very wheelchair accessible. So, for people who might feel like they have a mobility question, and really encourage them to reach out so that can connect them with the Local Arrangements Committee, to make sure that they are feeling as comfortable and welcome as possible in all situations, including recommending, you know, best restaurants and coffee shops that are wheelchair accessible. There certainly are plenty, but it's not everywhere. The hotel is, of course, completely ADA compliant.
Oh, and a different way of sort of access and welcome is to certainly encourage our membership to think about, you, diversity in all its myriad ways and to make sure that, we are entering into a respectful environment where we honor people's identities and names as they are telling us they are. And that's something that I hope will be able to do through the registration process and more, to just facilitate those kinds of respectful interactions.
TE: Yes, I agree. And I really do think that mutual respect is vitally important to the mission of the Society. So, we'll re-emphasize that much as we can.
Traveling en famille?
MB: Philly is a wonderful city for families to visit. If anyone hopes to travel to the conference with their children, I welcome them to reach out to the Local Arrangement Committee for some ideas on family-friendly activities.
Remote access?
MB: We have a very small number of panels for which the Program Committee has approved one Zoom presenter. However, there is no option to attend the conference virtually. Hybrid conferencing can necessitate trade-offs that are to the detriment of the experience for both remote and in-person attendees. The costs associated with the necessary technology are prohibitive. That being said, we hope to offer some online programming in the week leading up to the conference, although we are at the early stages of discussing this.
TE: Pre-conference meetings on French Presse, our online space for sharing new books and timely conversations, has brought an amazing energy to the in-person event. I look forward to hearing more about what that might look like this year. While this conference is open thematically for our participants, I can’t help but think of the connections and disconnectedness of our conference themes in Paris and Philly: resistance and liberties. Maybe the pre-conference event will facilitate that conversation?
Why Megan Is Excited for Everyone to come to Philly?
TE: So, I promised we wouldn’t go beyond a half hour, so let’s end with a fun question—one you’ve partially answered. Why Philadelphia?
MB: Philadelphia is historic, beautiful, walkable, and full of incredible art and food. I'm excited for the conference attendees to discover the small side streets and architecture of the city. My favorite activity in Philly is just wandering around, ideally bopping from one exceptional bakery to another. The newly opened Bread Room comes to mind, as do Majdal Bakery and Machine Shop. We also have great spots where you can pretend you're in France, like Supérette and Chateau Rouge. I truly love this city and this conference is a great opportunity to introduce it to so many others.
TE: Megan, I noticed in Paris your appreciation for the Lebanese za’atar pastry in the mornings. And, every time I’ve mentioned visiting a city, you’ve had a wonderful recommendation for me for visiting great bakeries. I’m sensing another kind of theme. Thank you for presiding over this opportunity for us to come together in intellectual community!
Gilbert Chinard Book Prize
The Gilbert Chinard Prize is awarded each year by the Society for French Historical Studies with the financial support of its Institut Français d’Amérique Fund. It recognizes the best book published for the first time and with a copyright date of 2024 by a North American press in one of the two following fields: the history of French-American relations; or the comparative history of France and North, Central, or South America—including critical editions of significant source materials and translations into English. We’re honored to announce this year’s winner:
Elisa Camiscioli
Selling French Sex: Prostitution, Trafficking and Global Migrations . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2024
In Selling French Sex: Prostitution, Trafficking and Global Migrations, Elisa Camiscioli examines the history of French sex workers and the idea of French sex in a global context in the first decades of the twentieth century. Writing against narratives that portrayed women migrating to sell sex as victims of trafficking, Camiscioli uncovers the complexity of their stories and thus explores the tension between choice and coercion of women who were mostly marginalized. In doing so, Camiscioli solidly situates their history within the larger histories of global migration. The author also explores how migration controls developed to bar sex workers, and thus, ironically, worked against the very women trafficking discourses identified as the most vulnerable. Rich in archival sources and written in limpid and elegant prose, Selling French Sex makes major interventions into several fields including French history, the history of women and gender, and the history of sexuality.
* * *
Elisa Camiscioli is Professor of History at Binghamton University, State University of New York. She is the author of Selling French Sex: Prostitution, Trafficking, and Global Migrations, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. Research drawn from the book won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Prize for the best article published in the fields of the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality; and the Society for French Historical Studies William Koren, Jr. Prize for the most outstanding article published in any period of French history. Her previous book, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century, was published by Duke University Press.
The SFHS Executive Board sincerely thanks the Chinard Book Prize Committee: Venita Datta, chair, Nina Kushner, and Ian Merkel, for their outstanding work on behalf of the Society and our field. We extend our appreciation to the editorial board and staff of Cambridge University Press. And, finally, we wish to thank author Elisa Camiscioli for this dynamic research. You’ll learn more about Gilbert Chinard or how to support this prize here.
The David H. Pinkney Prize
The Society for French Historical Studies awards the David H. Pinkney Prize to the most distinguished book in French history, published for the first time and with a copyright date of 2024 by a citizen of the United States or Canada or by an author with a full-time appointment at an American or Canadian college or university. The prize honors the contributions of David H. Pinkney to the development of French historical studies in the United States and to his field of 19th-century France. The winner of the prize this year:
Jennifer Ngaire Heuer
The Soldier’s Reward: Love and War in the Age of the French Revolution and Napoleon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024
In this groundbreaking book, Jennifer Heuer paints a vivid picture of the impact of prolonged warfare on the family and intimate relations during the revolutionary era. The book brings together a rich collection of military history sources (such as troop records, soldiers’ memoirs, and debates about conscription) and cultural history sources (such as music, art, plays, and festivals). The experiences and strategies of individual families are further illustrated in family letters and journals, police reports, and court records. Heuer details how soldiers were promised many things, including financial rewards, patriotic honor, and a happy family life once their military service was completed. The book deftly elucidates what prolonged warfare meant to soldiers and their families. This includes debates surrounding whether soldiers should marry and efforts to encourage marriage following demobilization, such as state-sponsored marriage rituals under Napoleon. The book also tackles the question of female military service and the extent to which women were recognized as veterans. Other highlights of the book include rich detail about men’s strategies to avoid lengthy military service, such as petitions for early demobilization and sham marriages. Heuer's expert analysis throughout the book illuminates how soldiers and their families navigated the disruptions of military service amidst a changing political landscape. Heuer’s inclusion of the Restoration period further illustrates the long-term impact of revolutionary warfare on families, notions of citizenship, and martial masculinity.
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Jennifer Ngaire Heuer is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts- Amherst, and the author of The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (Cornell), and with Mette Harder, co-editor of Life in Revolutionary France (Bloomsbury), and now her new book, The Soldier’s Reward: Love and War in the Age of the French Revolution and Napoleon (Princeton), as well as a variety of articles and book chapters in both French and English-language publications. With Christine Haynes, she is currently co-editor of the journal French Historical Studies.
On behalf of the SFHS Executive Board, I warmly thank the Pinkney Prize Committee: Margaret Andersen, chair, William C. Jordan, Michael Lynn, and Keith P. Luria for their outstanding work on behalf of the Society and our field. We thank the editorial board and staff of Princeton University Press. And, finally, we thank the author, Jennifer Heuer, for the opportunity to amplify this important work.
2024 PRIZES & AWARDS ANNOUNCED!
Click here for descriptions.
The David H. Pinkney Prize
Winner: Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, Citizenship. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Honorable Mention: H.B. Callaway, The House in the Rue Saint-Fiacre: A Social History of Property in Revolutionary Paris. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023.
The Gilbert Chinard Book Prize
Winner: Katlyn Marie Carter, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023.
Honorable mention: Sara E. Johnson, Encyclopédie noire : The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World. The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2023.
The William Koren Jr. Prize
Winner: Lauren R. Clay, “Liberty, Equality, Slavery: Debating the Slave Trade in Revolutionary France,” The American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (2023): 89-119.
Honorable Mention: Brett Bowles, “Fragmentary, Censored, Indispensable: The Audiovisual Archive of October 17, 1961,” French Historical Studies 46, no. 2 (2023): 177-212.
Honorable Mention: Jeffrey S. Ravel, "On the Playing Cards of the Dulac Brothers in the Year II," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 52, no. 1 (2023): 325-367.
The Farrar Memorial Awards
Winner: Olivia Cocking, "Droits assurés, droits bafoués: Race, Nationality, and the Right to Living Well in France After Empire."
Winner: Richard Todd Yoder, “Unorthodox Flesh: Gender, Religious Convulsions, and Charismatic Knowledge in Early Modern France”
The Institut Français d’Amérique Fund Research Fellowships
Winner, Harmon Chadbourn Rorison Fellowship: Jillian Kruse, “Printing Utopia: Experimentation, Collaboration, and Anarchy in the Prints of Camille Pissarro”
Winner, Catherine Maley Fellowship: Chanelle Dupuis. “Loss of smell: Absence and Extinction in 20th and 21st century French and Francophone literature”
The Laurie M. Wood Research Travel Award
Winner: Merve Fejzula, “Negritude and the Afro-Black Public Sphere 1947-77”
The Natalie Zemon Davis Award
Winner: Patrick Travens, “Jacobinism, Commerce, and Empire in Revolutionary Bordeaux.” (2023 SFHS-WSFH Detroit conference paper)
Society for French Historical Studies Defends Tenure
On January 12, 2023, Manhattan College terminated twenty-three faculty members, many of whom hold tenure, including two historians. Among the historians is Dr. Jeff Horn, Co-President of the Society for French Historical Studies. In Jeff’s case, this termination comes after more than two decades of committed service to the institution and its students. Many of you know Jeff as a highly accomplished, widely published historian of the French Revolution. His presidency of the SFHS is just one example of his generosity to the historical profession and to the field of French history, more specifically. This dismissal is, in academic terms, summary. The faculty members will be unemployed as of June 15, 2024. The college cites financial duress. However, without much more transparency about the process for deciding which departments and faculty members were targeted to be let go, the extreme solution of breaking tenure contracts cannot be justified. In fact, the nature of the trust between faculty member and institution on the matter of tenure is such that it should never be broken without the institution making every effort to retain the faculty member through the crisis or, in the worst case, support them in finding new employment or in re-professionalization and in a timely transition that respects the academic job calendar. These are ethical considerations. There are legal guidelines spelled out in the Manhattan College faculty handbook, especially around this short timeframe and severance package, which the college has disregarded. Manhattan College is attempting to censor the affected faculty from speaking “disparagingly” about the college in exchange for a minimal severance package. We wish to express our unwavering support for Jeff and our colleagues at Manhattan College.
Many of you have asked how you might offer material support for our colleagues as they negotiate with Manhattan College to reestablish their contract or establish fair severance. Jeff has shared this link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-defend-tenure-at-manhattan-college
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