Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies, the George L. Mosse Program in History, the Department of History, and the War in Society and Culture Program.
See the official conference webpage for the complete conference schedule.
Background:
For nearly 40 years, the History Department has grown a veritable Wisconsin School of French History through the work and mentorship of Suzanne Desan, Laird Boswell, and Mary Louise Roberts. This conference seeks to highlight the ways in which these three scholars have forged and enriched academic and nonacademic communities during their combined 93 years at UW-Madison. As advisors, they have trained 32 doctoral students while writing numerous monographs and articles that have become classics in their fields. Beyond their scholarly accomplishments, they have been some of the most visible and notable faculty in the UW History Department, reaching thousands of individuals through vibrant teaching for audiences from undergraduates to senior auditors, a public-facing video course, radio and television interviews, documentaries, speaking engagements with community groups, visiting professorships, and memorial initiatives in the US and Europe.
In keeping with both their research contributions and the wider resonance of the Wisconsin Idea, this two-day conference will provide a forum for scholarship and non-academic presentations by alumni in French and European history, showcasing how historians trained in this school have variously applied their skills. The meeting will host eight panels of mostly former students, with themes centered on revolution, war, French empire, gender, Germany, public service, teaching outside the academy, and PhD transferable skills. The panels attest to the diversity of thought and careers these scholars nurtured.
The excitement and diversity of responses by former students of Suzanne, Laird, and Lou speak to the influence that their mentorship and scholarship have had in academe and far beyond. We queried former UW-Madison history alumni as well as Lou’s students from Stanford about their interest in an event like this one and received more than 40 enthusiastic responses from a diversity of professional fields, geographic locations, and generations, pointing again to the profound impact of these scholars’ mentorship on the UW-Madison community, European History, and diverse professional fields including diplomacy, state government, university development, private school teaching, and the private sector. The conference program includes recent alumni and current graduate students, as well as students who worked with Suzanne, Laird, and Lou in the 1990s and early 2000s, at the very beginning of their careers.
Significance:
While these three historians’ significance to the profession, the Department, the College, the University as a whole cannot be easily quantified, the following offers a partial insight into the significance and legacy of the Wisconsin School of French History. Between them Professors Boswell, Desan, and Roberts have published 7 monographs and at least 82 articles. Their work has been widely supported by organizations including the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, Chateaubriand, the Social Science Research Council, the American Historical Association, and the Institute for Advanced Study.
In the realm of teaching, they have successfully advised 32 students through the Ph.D. Since 1999 alone, they have taught 10,025 undergraduate students for a total of 35,880 credit hours. And for this teaching they have been recognized across campus, including by the Chancellor, the University of Wisconsin Housing, and the Undergraduate History Association.
In service, they have sat on or chaired over 20 faculty search committees, acted as Department Chair, Directors of Graduate Studies, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Chair of the Center for European Studies, members of the Madison Mosse Faculty Committee, representatives on the Faculty Senate, and members of over a dozen other university committees.
Organizers:
- Skye Doney, Director, George L. Mosse Program in History
- Ethan Katz, Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Director, Center for Jewish Studies, University of California Berkeley
- Alice Kwok, Doctoral Candidate, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Katie Jarvis, Carl E. Koch Associate Professor of History, University of Notre Dame
- Emma Kuby, Assistant Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Abigail Lewis, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Nanovic Institute for European Studies, University of Notre Dame
- Terrence Peterson, Assistant Professor of History, Florida International University
Laird Boswell, Suzanne Desan, Mary Louise Roberts
Laird Boswell is a historian of Modern Europe, especially France, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His teaching and research interests have focused largely on society and politics, ranging from the transformations of rural society, to the history of European socialism and communism, the history of nationalism, voter behavior and, more recently, the contemporary extreme right. He has also undertaken extensive work in quantitative and oral history. Boswell’s first book focused on peasant communism in France. He is currently completing a study that uses the border region of Alsace and Lorraine to discuss changing conceptions of national belonging in twentieth-century France. In addition to his work in the History department, he has directed the University of Wisconsin Center for European Studies and has served as director of the UW study abroad program in Aix-en-Provence, France. He also works with students in the Professional French Masters Program interested in contemporary French politics and society (immigration, social movements, European affairs).
Suzanne Desan’s general field of study is early modern Europe, with a focus on early modern France and the French Revolution. Her research and teaching interests include popular politics and political activism, especially during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic era; gender; family; the Enlightenment; the transnational circulation of ideas, people, and practices; early modern European popular culture and religion; historical methods and social theory. Her books include Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France(1990); The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France(2004); and (as a co-editor) The French Revolution in Global Perspective (2013). To reach a wide audience, with the Great Courses she has produced a 48-lecture series entitled, Living the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon. Her current project examines the October Days uprising of 1789 during the French Revolution.
Mary Louise Roberts’s specialization is Women and Gender; France; and the Second World War. Her books includeDisruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-De-Siecle France (2002); What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (2013); D-Day through French Eyes(2014) and Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in WWII (2021). Her most recent book examines the corporeal experiences of the soldiers who fought in Belgium, France, and Italy during the last two years of the Second World War. For the soldiers who fought, the war was above all about their bodies. Relying on diaries and memoirs, Sheer Misery brings to life such visceral sense memories as the smell of corpses, the blandness of K-Rations and the horror of the “Screaming Meemies.”
