Jim Coons, “Here Are the People: The Scholarly Empathy of Laird Boswell, Suzanne Desan, and Mary Louise Roberts”

Conference program here.
Photos from the event.

Laird Boswell, Suzanne Desan, and Mary Louise Roberts have always placed people at the center of their scholarship. Speakers returned to this focus throughout the conference commemorating the “Wisconsin School of French History,” but a comment from Franca Barricelli, one of Suzanne’s first PhD students and longtime professor in the UW System, encapsulated this focus. During a panel on public service, she recalled the central question Suzanne had posed about her transnational, multi-disciplinary dissertation project, which she collaboratively advised with Domenico Sella (1926-2012): “Where are the people?” At first glance, little would unite dozens of presentations and discussions spanning from the Wars of Religion to the 2024 election; careers ranging from an Alaskan ecological guide to Independent School administrators; and teachers in classrooms from Hong Kong to Berkeley. Nevertheless, the coherence of the Wisconsin School of French History was immediately apparent in the dedication to authentically understanding the people the “Big Three” touched – whether historical subjects, students, or colleagues. Such empathy was the animating force of three distinguished careers and became the implicit theme of this memorable meeting.

No one who has read their scholarship, let alone had work edited by Laird, Lou, or Suzanne, will be shocked that former students consistently highlighted clarity of communication as a hallmark of the Big Three’s mentorship. Speaker after speaker reminisced about Suzanne’s crusade against the passive voice, Laird’s “webs” showing repetitive diction, or Lou’s talent for making unorthodox scholarship feel potent and urgent. But invariably, these were not issues of grammar or argumentation, but of building connections with the audience. Laird’s assignment to write in the style of the New York Review of Books, for instance, had initially flummoxed several seminar students. In retrospect, however, they marked the task as a moment of recognition that different audiences demand different approaches. At the same time, the corps of former TAs noted the ability of all three as lecturers to condense broad fields into comprehensible lessons, or to enliven an obscure subject by mining the complexities of a discrete detail or beloved fairy tale. In all cases, writing and speaking were always relational, not just expressive or performative. We had all learned that we must understand our audience no less than the content.

The Big Three made their ideas not just clear, but attractive, magnetic, and captivating, often with strategic use of humor. Attendees had obviously internalized this trait, as the meeting itself was shot through with comedy. Though it never approached a roast (following all three scholars’ preemptive and correct preference), the weekend hosted plenty of good-natured laughter at the productive frictions of life in seminars, archives, and dissertating. From Laird’s wry prods to make clear “Who cares?” about your argument, to Suzanne’s creative vulgarity on the squash court, to Lou’s description of weak analysis of a great research topic as a “licked cookie” that kept others from more fully digesting it – the joy of studying history at Madison was a centerpiece throughout the weekend.

Much of students’ positive experience stemmed from their sense that they could genuinely pursue whatever interests they discovered in the evidence. For my own part, Suzanne resolutely refused to even suggest that I focus on the Revolution or the eighteenth century once I seemed wrapped up in scurrilous mazarinade tracts. Others, like Alice Kwok, even got a push toward the outer limits of their ideas – in a prospectus defense for her project on Revolution-era emigrés, Lou had pointed out, “I don’t think this is weird enough for you.” (Kwok wound up studying French interest in Norse culture and symbolism in the nineteenth century.) Their unfaltering commitment to the varied, sometimes unconventional interests of their students showed in the incredible range of topics they oversaw, and in the wide-ranging careers that their students have pursued since graduating. Presentations included welfare abuse in England, erotic photography from Sicily and its German reception, Enlightenment magic and fortunetelling, the fraught marriage of a Nazi occupier’s wife, postcolonial East African conservation efforts… And yet, for all the differences in context and methodology, the presenters were united by the fundamental impulse to find the humanity in the object of research, and to connect with the interests and concerns of the audience.

For all their radical acceptance of students’ interests, of course Lou, Laird, and Suzanne were never pushovers or soft touches. Even beyond their boundary-pushing scholarship, they posed direct challenges to others’ assumptions. Lou’s casual mention to a classroom full of ROTC cadets that military service is not the only honorable way to serve one’s country stands out, though examples abound. Everyone seemed to have memories of the Big Three assigning powerful, difficult readings even to survey-level undergrads, or pushing for excellence in writing from students, colleagues, and even each other. Lou has, thankfully, forgiven Laird for the five single-spaced pages of feedback on her manuscript, including the comment that “let’s face it, this chapter doesn’t really have an argument.” The sum of these stories revealed more, and better than a “tough-love” style, inflexible demand for independent work and bootstrapping achievement. Suzanne, Lou, and Laird’s challenges always came packaged with the sense that you were absolutely capable of excellence – whatever that looked like in each instance – and that they would help you get there.

In the end, this conference was exceptional in many senses – most superficially, that it was simply an outstanding, inspiring, and productive gathering. Beyond that excellence, I have not often heard attendees of academic conferences remark on the “love” evident at a scholarly meeting, though that was a prominent theme for this one. Even more than the outpouring of affection for the Big Three, the sense of camaraderie and heartfelt friendship was palpable among everyone present during the sessions, in chance conversations, and in the generosity and warmth of the evening receptions. At the same time, it is rare that this kind of celebration of three prolific, trailblazing careers would focus so little on the books and articles of the scholars themselves – indeed, discussion of their prizewinning research was notable by its near-total absence from the weekend. But that was never the point – Lou, Laird, and Suzanne had characteristically forbidden us from organizing a festschrift, and the focus for the weekend was consciously not on what they wrote, won, or achieved. (For those things, we refer you here.) Rather, we celebrated what they gave, and what they meant to those they taught. As Lou put it succinctly in closing the final day, “You are all my life’s work.” Just as their research and teaching were driven by real care for the people they worked to understand, their empathy for students and colleagues shone throughout this event and stands as the measure of their contributions.