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Panel Discussion with Thomas Dodman, Carol Gluck, Mark Mazower, Emmanuelle Saada, and Joanna Stalnaker.
Les Volontaires tells the extraordinary story and “family romance” of a young man who was raised to be Rousseau’s Emile, and of his philosophe adoptive mother and step sister–cum–future wife, through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the early nineteenth century. Part micro-history, part social biography, this book explores ways and possibilities of writing a fragmentary history in a minor key.
This event will take place in English. It is presented as part of the New Books in the Arts and Sciences series by the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities and the Maison Française, and co-sponsored by ICLS.
About the Author
Thomas Dodman,Associate Professor of French, is a historian of modern France and its empire, with a broad training in cultural and intellectual history. His work ranges widely, but typically explores social transformation in times of war and revolution, and through the study of emotions and medicine in particular. He is the author of What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (Chicago, 2018) and he coedits the journal Sensibilités: Histoire, critique & sciences sociales (Anamosa). As director of Columbia's History and Literature (HiLi) MA, he also probes the porous boundary between these two disciplines and forms of writing. His new book, Les volontaires: roman familial de la révolution française (Seuil, 2025) was completed while in residence as a fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas & Imagination at Reid Hall in Paris.
About the Speakers
Carol Gluck is the George Sansom Professor of History Emerita, specializing in the history of modern Japan, international history, and public memory. Her books include Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period; Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon; Past Obsessions: World War II in History and Memory (forthcoming); in Japanese, Rekishi de kangaeru [Thinking with the Past] (revised edition, 2026) and Sensō no kioku [War memory] (2019). At Columbia she is a founding member and past chair of the Committee on Global Thought and has frequently taught in the MA in History and Literature program in Paris.
Mark Mazower, Ira D. Wallach Professor of History, specializes in modern Greece, 20th-century Europe, and international history. His current interests include the historical evolution of the Greek islands in the very long run. He comments on international affairs and reviews books for the Financial Times, the Nation, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and others. In 2016 he made a film Techniques of the Body, a meditation on the refugee crisis in Greek history, with director Constantine Giannaris. His most recent books are The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe (2021) which won the Duff Cooper Prize and What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home (Other Press, 2017), a family history. He is Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, which opened at Reid Hall in Paris in fall 2018 and which brings together scholars with leading artists, writers, composers and film-makers from around the world. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the British Academy.
Emmanuelle Saada’s main field of research and teaching is the history of the French empire in the 19th and 20th century, with a specific interest in law. Her first book, Les enfants de la colonie: les métis de l'Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté, was published in France in 2007 and translated in 2012 under the title Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation and Citizenship in the French Colonies (University of Chicago Press). Emmanuelle Saada is currently writing a historiographical book reflecting on French and European colonization as a history of the present. She is also working on a project on law and violence in Algeria and France in the 19th century. She has published several articles on colonial law, culture and politics as well as reflections on recent French debates in the social sciences. She is Department of French Chair and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Columbia University.
Joanna Stalnaker is Professor of French at Columbia. Her work on the French Enlightenment lies at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and the history of ideas. Her research interests include women writers, death and last works, and the theory and practice of description. She is the author of a prize-winning first book, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia (Cornell, 2010). Her new book, The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (Yale, 2025), is a moving, intimate portrait of the Enlightenment philosophers—notably a brilliant and unjustly neglected woman—as they were facing death.
Event Details & Important Information
This event is free and open to the public, but please note that registration does not guarantee a seat. We intentionally overbook our events, and seating is first come, first served. We recommend arriving early.
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