A Date with History: Did You Say Europe?

Our Festival Focus Day begins with keynote speeches by two eminent historians, Roger Chartier and Chris Clark. Roger Chartier will explore the creation of European Literature in Early Modern times, looking at Don Quixote’s reception and translations in Spain, France and England. Chris Clark will discuss 1848 as a European Revolution. Unlike the revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1870, 1917 and 1989, the revolutions of 1848 were a continent-wide phenomenon. He reflects on the unique simultaneity of these revolutions, on their trans-national consequences and on their meaning as a European event.

About the speakers

Roger Chartier is a Honorary Professor at the Collège de France and Annenberg Visiting Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. At the Collège de France he held the Chair in Writing and Cultures in Modern Europe.
His work is in the tradition of the “Annales School”. His research focuses on the history of written culture and its relationship with literature in a comparative perspective in France, England and Spain. He also worked on the history of education, the history of the book and the history of reading. His work crosses history with different disciplines such as philosophy or sociology.

Roger has received academic and honorary distinctions from around the world, including the 1990 Annual Award of the American Printing History Association and the Prix Gobert of the Académie Française in 1992. He is Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Doctor Honoris Causa of the University Carlos III in Madrid, the University of Buenos Aires, the University of Santiago de Chile, the Laval University in Quebec and the University of Neuchâtel. His latest books published in English are Cardenio between Cervantes and Shakespeare. The Story of a Lost Play, tr. Janet Lloyd, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013 and The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind, tr. Lydia G. Cochrane, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2014.

Chris Clark is Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. His research interests are centred on the history of 19th-century Germany and continental Europe. His early work focused on the political and cultural history of religion. Chris’s first book was a study of the relationship between Christians and the Jewish minority in Prussia between 1728 and 1941; here he explored the ways in which contemporary understandings of Christianity shaped successive mutations of the ’Jewish Question’. Since then he has published various articles and essays on related subjects - some of them examine the trouble that results when the state authority takes the initiative in religious questions, others look at the ways in which questions of religious allegiance were implicated in processes of political and cultural change.

In 2004 he co-edited, with Wolfram Kaiser of the University of Portsmouth, an edited volume about the ’culture war’ between Catholic and secular social forces that polarised so many European states in the years 1850-1890. In the meanwhile, he has published a study of Kaiser Wilhelm II (2000) for the Longmans/Pearson series Profiles in Power, completed a general history of Prussia for Penguin and published The Sleepwalkers, a study of the outbreak of the First World War.

Our speakers, including Jean-Frédéric Schaub of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and Peter Mandler of the University of Cambridge, examine issues around Europe’s identities.

Speakers:
• Stuart Carroll, University of York
• Jean-François Dunyach, Université Paris-Sorbonne
• Peter Mandler, University of Cambridge (Chair)
• Jean-Frédéric Schaub, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)
• Astrid Swenson, Brunel University London

About the speakers

Stuart Carroll is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of York. He has wide interests in the history of early modern Europe and the history of violence. He is currently editor of vol 3 of The Cambridge World History of Violence, 1500-1800. He is working on a book of essays called the Politics of Enmity, which compares France, Germany and Italy.

Stuart’s initial research work centred on the political culture during the French Wars of Religion, and on the interface between noble followings and popular religious mentalities, and he was twice winner of the Nancy Roelker prize for the best article published in English in early modern France (2000 & 2003). More recently, he published a major evaluation of the role of feud and vendetta in early modern France: Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (2006), which led him to re-think the role of violence in history in the edited collection, Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective (2007). His most recent book, Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (2009), was awarded the J. Russell Major prize by the American Historical Association in 2011 for the best French history book of the year.

Jean-François Dunyach is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. His research interests are the intellectual and cultural history of Western Europe in the eighteenth century. He is also working on the Enlightenment in the Atlantic Area especially the Scottish Enlightenment and the figure of William Playfair. He wrote a biography of William Playfair published as part of the book edited by A.I. Macinnes & D.J. Hamilton Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680-1820. Furthermore, he wrote several publications about the concept of decline in the Enlightenment thought in a comparative perspective between France and Great Britain.
He is currently a member of the organizing committee of the Franco-British History seminar at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, in partnership with several other institutions such as the Institute of Historical Research and the Maison Française d’Oxford.

Peter Mandler is Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and Bailey College Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College. Born in the USA in 1958, he was educated at Oxford and Harvard Universities and has taught in Britain since 1991 and in Cambridge since 2001.

Peter writes on the cultural, social and intellectual history of Britain since c. 1800 and on the history of the humanities and the social sciences in the English-speaking world. From 2012 to 2016 he served a four-year term as President of the Royal Historical Society. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jean-Frédéric Schaub is a French historian and Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)
He was a Fellow of Christ Church at the University of Oxford (2006-2008) and a Fellow Researcher at the Centre for the History of the Overseas at the New University of Lisbon (2009-2010). He is currently a member of the executive committee of TEPSIS Excellence Lab and a member of the Scientific Board EHESS. He is also a member of the Centre de recherches sur le Brésil colonial et contemporain and of the Laboratoire Mondes américains.

His book La France espagnole. Les racines hispaniques de l’absolutisme français was awarded the François Furet Prize in 2003.
From 2005, he has been Visiting Professor in numerous world-class universities such as Yale University, the University of Oxford, Meiji University Tokyo, Waseda University Tokyo, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro or New York University.
His research focuses on changing process in political structures of Western Europe in the modern era, especially from Iberian cases. His recent publications include Pour une histoire politique de la race. (Paris, Editions du Seuil, coll. La Librairie du XXIe siècle).

Astrid Swenson is a Senior Lecturer in European History at Brunel University London. She studied History, Art History and French in Mainz and Dijon, before moving to Cambridge for her PhD. Prior to her current post, she held research fellowships in Vienna and Cambridge. In September she will take up a Professorship at Bath Spa University.

Astrid writes on the cultural and social history of Europe in the 19th and 20th century. Her research focuses on heritage, memory, art and museums and is driven by questions about individuals’ and societies’ relationship to their past, the movement of people, objects and ideas across borders, and ideas about the local, the national and the global. Her books The Rise of Heritage in France, Germany and England, 1789-1914 (Cambridge University Press 2013) and From Plunder to Preservation: Britain and the Heritage of Empire (edited with Peter Mandler, Oxford University Press, 2013) showed the importance of internationalisation for the modern preservation of the past during the long 19th century. She currently writes on the relation of heritage, nationalism, imperialism and Europeanness through a study of crusader sites across the Mediterranean.

Renaud Morieux of the University of Cambridge and Christina de Bellaigue of the University of Oxford, together with other members of our expert panel, explore France and Britain’s relationship from different standpoints. Renaud will examine migrations from the 17th to 19th centuries, while Christina will discuss women and social mobility.

Speakers:
• Christina de Bellaigue, University of Oxford
• Fabrice Bensimon, Université Paris-Sorbonne - UCL
• Claire Judde de Larivière, Université de Toulouse - Birkbeck College, University of London (Chair)
• Renaud Morieux, University of Cambridge

About the speakers:

Christina de Bellaigue is Jackson Fellow and Tutor in History at Exeter College Oxford. Her research focuses on the history of education, the history of women, and on the history of social mobility in 19th-century Britain and France. Her first book Educating Women: Schooling and identity in England and France 1800-1867 (Oxford, 2007) explored the history of girls’ education as a way of thinking about the lives of women, and ideas of femininity and nationality in the 19th century. More recently she has published a collection on Home Education in Historical Perspective (London, 2016). She is currently writing a book that examines the experiences of two families over four generations. Uncovering the experiences of these families - one English and one French - will offer new insights into the history of social mobility on either side of the Channel.

Christina studied history as an undergraduate in Cambridge, then at the Sorbonne in Paris, before going back to Cambridge to do her doctoral research. She joined the University of Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow of Merton College and has been Jackson Fellow, Tutor and University Lecturer in Modern History at Exeter since 2006.

Fabrice Bensimon is a French professor in British history and civilization at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. For 2016-2018, he is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at University College London (UCL).
He is a specialist of the political and social history of the British Isles in the 19th century. His research also focuses on migration between France and Britain and more widely between Britain and the European continent in the 19th century especially during the period of industrialization (1815-1870).

Claire Judde de Larivière is Senior Lecturer in medieval and Renaissance history at the Université de Toulouse and honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. She studies the history of late medieval and early modern Venice, focusing on the Venetian society and the ordinary people : social hierarchy, sociability, political actions, and relationship with Justice. Her latest book, La révolte des boules de neige. Murano face à Venise, 1511 (Paris, Fayard, 2014), will be published in English next year by Routledge (The Snowball Revolt. Murano against Venice 1511).

Renaud Morieux is a Senior Lecturer in British History and a Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge. He is also Associate Research Fellow in the Joint Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge and Associate Research Fellow at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He joined Cambridge’s Faculty of History in 2011 and was previously a Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor) in Modern History at the Université de Lille (2006-2011). He studied History at Ecole Normale Supérieure, Université Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne, and Université de Lille. He was a Chevening Scholar at University College, London in 2000-1.

Renaud’s research focuses on the history of Franco-British relations in the 18th century, transnational exchanges and national belongings. He is currently working on British and French concepts and experiences of war captivity in the 18th century and how captivity can create opportunities for exchanges between the French and the British, in Europe, the West Indies and India. In 2014, he won a Philip Leverhulme Prize for History.

Join historians, including Maxine Berg of the University of Warwick and Claire Zalc of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), as they examine the topical issue of European migration. Maxine will explore skills circulation, while Claire will look at nationalities at the beginning of the 20th century.

Speakers:
• Claire Alexander, University of Manchester
• Maxine Berg, University of Warwick
• Thomas Glesener, Université d’Aix-Marseille
• Robert Winder, Author of Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain and Trustee of the Migration Museum Project (Chair)
• Claire Zalc, Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS)

About the speakers:

Claire Alexander is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester. She has researched, written and published on issues of race, ethnicity, youth and migration in Britain for over 25 years. She is author of The Art of Being Black (1996), The Asian Gang (2000) and The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration (with Joya Chatterj and Annu Jalais, 2016). A former Trustee of The Runnymede Trust, Claire has worked closely with Runnymede over the past decade on several projects aimed at diversifying the school history curriculum (see www.banglastories.org, www.makinghistories.org.uk, www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk)

Maxine Berg is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, and a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society. She is an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford (2009-present), and was Director of the Global History and Culture Centre (2007-2010), Director of the Eighteenth-Century Centre (1998-2007) and a Guggenheim Fellow (2003-2004).

Maxine’s research interests are in global history, especially Asia and Europe in the early modern period; history of knowledge and technology; history of material culture, especially textiles, porcelain and luxury manufactured goods; also history writing and historiography 1920s-1960s. Her books include Goods from the East: Trading Eurasia 1600-1800 (Palgrave Publishers, 2015), Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (OUP, 2005), A Woman in History; Eileen Power 1889-1940 (Cambridge, 1996) and The Age of Manufactures. Second Edition (Routledge, 1994). She is now working on connections between the Indian Ocean, East Asia and the Pacific, and especially on the fur trade from Nootka Sound 1778-1820.

Thomas Glesener is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the Université d’Aix-Marseille. He is a member of the laboratory ‘Temps, Espaces, Langages, Europe Méridionale – Méditerrannée’ which specialises in Mediterranean Europe. His main research focuses on the history of the Hispanic world from the 17th century to the 19th century, through topics such as military history, migrations or political identities in Spain. He also works on the issues of mobility, migration and integration in the Mediterranean and Atlantic areas in the 18th century. His PhD thesis will be published in Autumn 2017: L’empire des exilés. Les Flamands et le gouvernement de l’Espagne (Madrid, Casa de Velázquez). He is currently working on a research project on the movements of Muslims and Eastern Christians in the Hispanic World during the Modern Era.

Robert Winder is the author of Bloody Foreigners: the Story of Immigration to Britain and (forthcoming) The Last Wolf: the Hidden Springs of Englishness. A former Literary Editor of The Independent, and a novelist, he is also a trustee of the Migration Museum Project, which aims to create a national museum of migration for the UK.

Claire Zalc is a CNRS Research Director at the Institute of Modern and Contemporary History at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and Co-director of the ‘Histoire-Repères’ collection at La Découverte and of the Pouvoirs journal. She is currently a member of the editorial board of the following magazines: French Politics, Culture and Society, Vingtième siècle. Revue d´histoire and Le Mouvement social. In 2012, she won the André Conquet Prize for her book: Melting Shops: une histoire des commerçants étrangers en France. One year later, she received the Bronze medal of the CNRS.

Her latest book, Dénaturalisés. Les retraits de nationalité sous Vichy, is a finalist for the Prix du livre d’histoire du Sénat 2017. She has written on topics as various as immigration, the history of persecutions, Jews, business and credit. Her earlier books include: Zalc, C. & Bruttmann, T. (2016). Microhistories of the Holocaust. New York, Berghahn Books and Zalc C. (2016) Dénaturalisés. Les retraits de nationalité sous Vichy. Paris, Seuil.