Digital Engagement beginning during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Society for French Historical Studies
Organized by Sally Charnow and Jeff Horn, Co-Presidents
French Presse Series
French Presse: New Books on French and Francophone History began in 2021 to build community during the pandemic and highlight new work of scholars. We created a series of seven sessions that explored the relationship between the concepts of liberty and race as well as the practices of enslavement, disenfranchisement, and commemoration. Due to the success of this series, we continued our French Presse online events, even after in-person conferences resumed. Further French Presse events can be found here.
Spring 2021: Race, Gender, Colonialism, and Occupation
January 24, 2021: Tyler Stovall, White Freedom, The Racial History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2021).
Interviewer: Alyssa Sepinwall, California State University at San Marcos.
February 28, 2021: Sarah Zimmerman, Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire (Ohio University Press, 2020) and Sarah Frank, Hostages of Empire: Colonial Prisoners of War in Vichy France (Nebraska University Press, July 2021).
Interviewer: Ruth Ginio, Bar Ilan University.
March 14, 2021: Itay Lotem, The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2021).
Interviewer: Charlotte Faucher, University of Manchester.
April 18, 2021: Nimisha Barton, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880-1945 (Cornell University Press, 2020).
Interviewer: Emmanuelle Saada, Columbia University.
May 16, 2021: Jessica Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
Interviewer: Lorelle Semley, College of the Holy Cross.
June 27, 2021: Laure Humbert, Reinventing French Aid. The Politics of Humanitarian Relief in French Occupied Germany, 1945-1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Interviewer: Jessica Lynne Pearson, Macalester College.
July 13, 2021: Alyssa Sepinwall, Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games (University Press of Mississippi, forthcoming June 2021).
Interviewer: Christy Pichichero, George Mason University.
SFHS Event: Academic Libraries and Digital Humanities (Thu., 27 May at noon, Eastern time)
This event, originally scheduled as a breakout session for the Digital Humanities: Ways Forward conference in March 2021, explored two technologies: StoryMapJS and ImagePlot as vehicles for analyzing and presenting an array of digital material, including a personal diary recounting a French soldier and his experience during WWI. The session highlighted ways that academic libraries and librarians have taken a leading role in providing digital content from their collections.
The WWI Diary of Albert Huet was presented by Hélène Huet, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. See here and here for more details about the project.
Visualization of French Book Covers from the Liberation Collection (1944-1946) at Cambridge University was presented by Wooseob Jeong, Emporia State University and Irene Fabry-Tehranchi, Cambridge University Library. See here and here for more details about the project.
Sally Charnow, Hofstra University, moderated.