New Books in French Studies

Jan 29 2025 592 ep. 59 mins 1.2k
New Books in French Studies Podcast artwork

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  History
RSS feed Share
Copy RSS


Subscribe on Podcast Addict


Elizabeth Campbell, "Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Jan 29 2025 58 mins  
Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation, in both the Third Reich and occupied territories. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories in churches, castles, and salt mines. Well publicized restitution cases, such as that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting

Udo Hock, "The Mysterious Messages of the Other: On the Work of Jean Laplanches" (Psychosozial-Verlag, 2024)

Jan 26 2025 72 mins  
Udo Hock's Die rätselhaften Botschaften des Anderen. Zum Werk Jean Laplanches (The enigmatic messages of the other. On the work of Jean Laplanche), came out in 2024 with Psychosozial-Verlag, and collectes nine essays that Hock published over the past twenty years. Published in 2024 to celebrate Laplanche's centennial, these papers are a crucial contribution to Laplanche studies fr

Hélène Tessier, "Laplanche's Vocabulary" (PUF, 2024)

Jan 24 2025 87 mins  
In Vocabulaire de Laplanche (PUF, 2024), edited by the renowned scholar and analyst, Hélène Tessier, several of the key readers of Jean Laplanche's work propose what is nothing short of a revelation for Laplanche studies. Theirs is a vocabulary that provides a concise and accessible dictionary of key Laplanchian terms, inviting readers of Laplanche's work to engage with the Frenc

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe

Jan 23 2025 69 mins  
Henry Christophe was born to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, and fought to overthrow the British in North America before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue—as Haiti was then called—to end slavery. He rose to power and became their king. In his time, he was popular and famous the world over. So how did he become an enigma? In The First

Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, "The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Jan 17 2025 50 mins  
Every year, the chilly mistral wind blows through the Rhône valley of southern France, across the Camargue wetlands, and into the Mediterranean Sea. Most forceful when winter turns to spring, the wind knocks over trees, sweeps trains off their tracks, and destroys crops. Yet the mistral turns the sky clear and blue, as it often appears in depictions of Provence. The legendary wind

Emily Marker, "Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Jan 05 2025 68 mins  
Thinking together the histories of European integration and African decolonization, Emily Marker's Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era (Cornell University Press, 2022) is a pathbreaking study of how the two continents continued to make one another's histories in the years after the Second World War. Tracking the ways that young people and educa

Stuart Elden, "The Early Foucault" (Polity Press, 2021)

Jan 03 2025 53 mins  
What were the key ideas and influences on Michel Foucault’s early career? In The Early Foucault (Polity Press, 2021), Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick and author of the Progressive Geographies blog, charts Foucault’s formative intellectual years leading up to the publication of the ground-breaking The History of Madness. The

Camille Robcis, "Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Jan 02 2025 64 mins  
On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews scholar and historian Camille Robcis. In her most recent book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, psychiatric and psychoanalytic meaning of institutional psychotherapy as articulated at Saint-Alban Hospital in Franc

Jessica Namakkal, "Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Jan 01 2025 84 mins  
After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered territories governed by the French imperial state. It was not until 1962 that France fully relinquished control. Once decolonization took hold across the subcontinent, Western-led ashrams and utopian communities remained in and around the former French territory of Pondicherry—most notably t

Emily Herring, "Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People" (Basic Books, 2024)

Dec 29 2024 66 mins  
Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (Basic Books, 2024) is the first English-language biography of Henri Bergson, the philosopher who defined individual creativity and transformed twentieth century thought. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Henri Bergson became the most famous philosopher on earth. Where prior thinkers sketched out a p