Full conference description:
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 have 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.
Biographical statements:
Leslie Abadie was the Graduate Program Manager in the Department of History at UW from 2007-2023. She guided hundreds of graduate students, including dozens of French historians, through the maze of graduate school and played a key role in developing the program’s career diversity initiatives. She served on numerous departmental committees with Suzanne, Lou, and Laird over the years, including working closely with Laird when he served as the Director of Graduate Studies (2010-2012). She currently is the Department of History’s Department Administrator.
Conrad Allen is from Columbus, Ohio and graduated from Ohio State in 2016 with a bachelor’s degree in history. His sister, Grace (below!), was a PhD candidate in French history at UW-Madison at the time, working with Lou Roberts and Laird Boswell. He visited Madison, and liked it, and decided to enroll here too, which he did in 2016, with Lou and Laird as his advisors as well. He believes that this made the Allens the first ever pair of siblings in the department with the same advisors, at the same time, although it is worth noting that he was interested in history long before his sister. In 2018 Conrad completed a master’s project entitled “No Cavalryman’s War? Horsemen, Manhood, and Modernity in the British Army 1900-1939.” In 2019 he received a Chateaubriand Fellowship to conduct dissertation research in Paris – just as his sister had a couple years before – but unlike his sister he ended up leaving the program upon returning from France. He currently works as the manager of volunteer operations at the American College of Chest Physicians, a non-profit medical association in Chicago.
Grace Allen completed her PhD in European history at UW-Madison in 2017. Her dissertation focused on French commercial exhibitions and national identity after World War II. From 2017-2022, Grace lived in Shenzhen, China, where she taught history and general education courses as a Lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. She also spent an unexpected (but extremely rewarding) ten months in COVID-free Taiwan during the pandemic. She now teaches 9th-12th grade history at the College Preparatory School in Oakland, California. Her 12th grade seminar, “A Global History of Consumer Culture,” is the third permutation of the course she developed as a George L. Mosse Teaching Fellow in 2015. She also teaches Asian and Atlantic World history and enjoys introducing high schoolers to the Eurovision Song Contest.
Jordanna Bailkin is the Jere L. Bacharach Professor in International Studies and Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is a scholar of Britain and the British Empire, with interests in decolonization, legal history, urban identity, gender history, and the history of material culture and emotions. Her books include The Culture of Property, The Afterlife of Empire, and Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain. The Afterlife of Empire won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the American Historical Association, the Stansky Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies, and the Biennial Book Prize from the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies. She has also written articles on interracial murder in India, tattooing in Burma, and parenthood in Nigeria. She is at work on a new project about emotion and the welfare state, tentatively titled Friends and Neighbors: A History of Caring and Uncaring in Modern Britain. Jordanna received her PhD at Stanford University in 1998, where she was proud to study gender history and modern European history with Lou Roberts; Lou has continued to be a much-valued mentor.
Franca Barricelli received her Ph.D. in 1994 as a student of Suzanne Desan, in collaboration with Domenico Sella (1926-2012), in early modern Italian history. She is professor emerita of History at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. Franca’s primary research interest revolves around the question of historical representation. In studies of Venice at the end of its millennial Republic, she examined the relationship between theatre and the city’s shifting political identity in the context of Napoleonic collapse and occupation. In conducting her research, Franca was the recipient of grants from Fulbright, the NEH, and the Delmas Foundation. In her teaching career, Franca offered a wide range of courses in Renaissance and early modern European and Italian history and taught summer programs in Rome for many years. As an administrator, Franca served as founding Dean of Arts and Sciences at Fitchburg State University, where she collaborated with 100 full-time faculty members in programs spanning the humanities, fine and performing arts, social sciences, and Interdisciplinary Studies. Currently, Franca provides leadership at FSU in faculty development and curricular innovation, including overseeing centers for International Education, Faculty Scholarship and Teaching, Civic Engagement, General Education, and the Center for Italian Culture.
John Boonstra is currently a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches modern European and Mediterranean, colonial, and gender history. Lou and Laird were his graduate advisors, in the fields of modern gender and modern French history. (He even learned a little early modern history with Suzanne). He is at work, on and off, on two projects that build on, respectively, his MA and PhD work at Wisconsin: the first, Colonizing the Great War: Race, Sex, and Violence in Imperial Borderlands, on the gendered receptions of French colonial soldiers stationed in Germany during and after the First World War; and the other, Finding France in the Levant, on notions of the “Levant” in the nineteenth and twentieth century French imperial imagination.
Charlie Cahill completed his PhD in German history in 2015, but he had the most fun with the French historians. He remained in Madison working at The Corporation through 2019 before deciding he wanted to spend more of his life outside than inside. After spending a year doing residential construction work in Arizona and Colorado, he worked two seasons as a private yacht captain in the Mediterranean. Currently he spends the summer working as a naturalist on a non-profit ecotourism boat in Southeast Alaska, while doing boat delivery work in the winters.
Robert Christl is the Program Director at Worker Justice Wisconsin, a worker center located in Madison. Christl oversees the educational, workplace, and co-op organizing that his team does. The worker center aims to build collective worker power with faith and labor allies, focusing primarily on low-wage, immigrant employees. While in grad school, he researched early twentieth-century anarchist intellectuals and labor movements. He paid special attention to anarchists’ participation in political economic debates after World War I and how those transnational debates informed the economic policies implemented during the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. Laird and Lou both served on his committee, and he took several courses with them and Suzanne.
David Ciarlo is currently an Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Colorado (Boulder), where he teaches European History, German History, and the History of Imperialism and Empire. David received his PhD from Wisconsin in 2003, writing a dissertation on colonialism and culture in imperial Germany. Suzanne and Laird were both mentors throughout his time at Madison, offering their wisdom, sound advice, thoughtful criticism, and good humor! (And he is eternally grateful for their help and support.) During his dissertation defense, Suzanne made an offhand comment (“I think this dissertation is actually more about visuality than colonialism”), and that single comment, years later, caused him to rethink and then rework the entire framing of the book: it became Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany, published by Harvard in 2011. His new book is also about visuality, but this time, about a visuality of “whiteness,” exploring how advertising formed a pool of racialized imagery from which propagandists drew during the First World War, and from which the National Socialists plagiarized in the 1930s. Tentatively titled Selling War: Advertising, Propaganda, and the Origins of the Fascist Aesthetic in German Visual Culture, 1910-1925, it should be finished by 2025. (Photo by Casey A. Cass/University of Colorado).
Jim Coons is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. In 2014, he completed his doctoral thesis, The Grand Condé and the King: Absolutism, Rebellion, and the Evolution of Political Culture (1643-1659), under the supervision of Suzanne Desan. His research continues to investigate the informal vectors of French politics during Louis XIV’s early reign, especially around the rebellion of the Fronde. In particular, he focuses on the role of emotions, humor, and community sentiment in the deployment of legal and political power, especially in relation to the powerful Condé house. His teaching seeks to use similar approaches, using games, comedy, and recently AI in the classroom to build empathetic connections with the past.
Photo credit: Craig Schreiner
Ethell Gershengorin
Ethell Gershengorin is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison specializing in Imperial Russian and Soviet History. Specifically, she works in the fields of gender and women’s history and Jewish studies. Ethell received her BA in International Relations from Boston University and her MA in History from UW-Madison. Her master’s thesis examined the centrality of the peasant woman to Soviet anti-religious campaigns. Ethell’s dissertation traces medical aid directed toward Jewish women and children in interwar Eastern Europe. Ethell has received numerous fellowships and awards for her academic achievements, including the Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Center for Jewish History’s Rifkind Graduate Research Fellowship, and the Max and Cecil (Steuer)/JDC Archives Fellowship. Ethell had the pleasure of taking several classes with Prof. Lou Roberts and is lucky to have had Prof. Roberts serve on her MA committee and currently serving on her dissertation committee. Lou’s teaching on modern European gender history and mentorship have been foundational to Ethell’s research and thinking.
Chad S.A. Gibbs is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies at the College of Charleston. He is a historian of the Holocaust particularly interested in resistance, oral history, and the legacies of genocide. Chad received his PhD from the UW-Madison Department of History in 2021 with a minor in Gender and Women’s History. Mary Louise Roberts was Chad’s minor advisor, a member of his dissertation committee, and largely shaped his understandings of gender and masculinity in historical research. His paper will honor those and so many other debts while focusing on some of the ways in which Lou’s analyses of authenticity and the embodied experience of combat in her book Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in WWII can be turned to the understanding of Holocaust experiences.
Gillian Glaes taught modern European and global history at Carroll College before heading over to the University of Montana, where she serves as the Director of the Franke Global Leadership Initiative, an undergraduate certificate program in global leadership and experiential and interdisciplinary learning. She has also worked as a Visiting Professor in History and Director of the Humanities Institute at UM, where she and her faculty colleagues earned a $500,000 NEH grant. Dr. Glaes has taught widely in modern European, African, and global history and has given professional presentations and participated in seminars in the U.S., Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, and Germany. She has written numerous articles on the politics of African immigration in France. Her most recent book publication, which started as a dissertation under the direction of Laird Boswell at UW-Madison, is African Political Activism in Post-Colonial France: State Surveillance and Social Welfare. She is currently working on a co-edited volume on anti-racism in France and a biography of the political activist Sally N’Dongo.
Holly Grout is Professor of History at the University of Alabama. At UW, she completed graduate coursework with and served as a teaching assistant for Lou, Laird, and Suzanne. A student of the history of Modern France and gender, she was co-advised by Lou and Laird. Suzanne served on her PhD examination and dissertation committees. Since finishing her PhD in 2008, Holly has taught at the University of Alabama, she has written two books: The Force of Beauty: Transforming Ideas of French Femininity in the Third Republic and Playing Cleopatra: Inventing Female Celebrity in Third Republic France, authored several academic articles, and served as book placement editor for H-France Review. She is currently working on her third book, Bébé: A Critical Biography of France’s Most Notorious “It Girl.”
Katherine Guenoun focused on French Jewish history in nineteenth-century France in her PhD. Lou Roberts and Laird Boswell were her doctoral advisors and Suzanne Desan served on her dissertation committee. Since finishing her doctorate in 2015, Katherine has worked in software technical training and instructional design. She currently lives in Maryland and works as a Senior Instructional Systems Designer at Appian Corporation.
John W. Hall is the inaugural holder of the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair in U.S. Military History and a past president of the Society for Military History. His work lies in the literal and figurative borderlands of the Early Republic of the United States, straddling the fields of military and American Indian history. In 2017, Mary Louise Roberts and he co-founded the War in Society & Culture Program within the UW’s History Department, and they have each contributed to the forthcoming Cambridge History of War and Society in America. His other publications include multiple essays on early American warfare and Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War. His present book project is Dishonorable Duty: The U.S. Army and the Removal of the Southeastern Indians.
Kilian Harrer is a researcher at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz, Germany. Previously, he was employed as a researcher at the Collaborative Research Center at the University of Munich. In 2021, he completed a dissertation at UW–Madison on “Pilgrimage and Borders in Western Central Europe, c. 1770–1810.” His doctoral advisor was Suzanne Desan, and Laird Boswell was one of his committee members. When entering graduate school, he was obsessed with the Ancien Régime. But after two or three semesters at UW, he saw the light thanks to Suzanne’s patient and wise scholarly guidance and, above all, her contagious enthusiasm and switched his focus towards the French revolutionary era. Building on his dissertation, he is currently polishing his first book manuscript. It argues that French- and German-speaking pilgrims boldly transformed the devotional and political repertoires of Catholicism throughout the decades around 1800, especially by contributing to a revolution in border culture. At the IEG, he has also begun developing a new book project on bees, beekeeping, and bee symbolism in early modern Europe.
David Harrisville is an independent scholar specializing in the history of modern Germany, the Third Reich, and the Second World War. He received his PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017, where he also held several academic posts. He has been awarded numerous fellowships, including at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Frei Universität zu Berlin. He served as Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Furman University from 2018-19 and currently works as a Learning Designer at Brown University. His first book was The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944. He worked closely with Lou and Laird in grad school, and they both served on his dissertation committee.
Kelly Jakes earned her PhD in Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture from UW-Madison in 2014. While there, she worked closely with Professor Roberts on her dissertation project, which she later published as a monograph, Strains of Dissent: Popular Music and Everyday Resistance in WWII France, 1940-1945. Based on extensive archival research, the book recovers the significance of music as a rhetorical means of survival, subversion, and national identity construction for French citizens during the Second World War. Kelly is now Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the College of Charleston, where she teaches and researches in the areas of public address, rhetorical criticism, social movements, and popular culture. Her current work explores the relationship between Black music and constructions of African American citizenship.
Katie Jarvis is a historian of France and Carl E. Koch Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on popular politics, broadly conceived, during the French Revolution. She is especially interested in the intersection of social and cultural history, as well as gender history. Her first book, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, integrates politics, economics, and gender to ask how Parisian market women invented notions of citizenship through everyday trade during the Revolution. She is currently working on a book project entitled Democratizing Forgiveness in Revolutionary France, 1789-1799, which probes how the French revolutionaries refashioned forgiveness through economic, judicial, and cultural venues from 1789 to 1802. Katie worked with Suzanne at UW-Madison from 2007 to 2014, where Suzanne generously mentored her through countless drafts, grant applications, and professional development. Katie also had the good fortune to take seminars with Lou and Laird, who continued to share their insights as members of her dissertation committee. Suzanne and Lou taught Katie how to teach as their TA.
Erik Jensen is an Associate Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he teaches courses on German, European, and world history. His first book, Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity, explored the role of sports in shaping social and cultural ideals after the First World War. He has also written on the postwar LGBTQ movement and on the historical intersection between sports and sexuality. He is currently working on a deep biography of the half-Jewish tennis player and pioneering journalist Paula von Reznicek, whose personal fortunes reflected the political and social fluctuations of the twentieth-century Germany through which she lived. Erik is so grateful to have benefited from Suzanne’s and Laird’s guidance throughout his time in Madison, 1993-2002, including on his dissertation committee, and he had the opportunity to meet Lou just as she was arriving and he was preparing to leave.
Ben Kafka is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. He serves on the clinical faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He also co-directs the working group on the history of the mind sciences at the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College/New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He’s the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork and co-editor of William Pietz’s The Problem of the Fetish. He had the great privilege of studying with Lou at Stanford, where he received his PhD in European intellectual and cultural history in 2004.
Ethan Katz was educated at Amherst College (B.A., History & French, 2002) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.A., History, 2005; PhD, History, 2009). He is currently Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. A specialist of France and the Francophone world, Katz’s research interests include Jewish-Muslim relations, Jews in colonial societies, Holocaust studies, and the interplay between religious and secular in modern Jewish life. His first book, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard, 2015), received a number of prizes, including the J. Russell Major Prize of the American Historical Association, the David Pinkney Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and a National Jewish Book Award. Katz has co-edited three volumes: Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (UPenn, 2015), Colonialism and the Jews (Indiana, 2017), and most recently, Jews and Muslims in France Before and After Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher (special issue of Jewish History, 2018). His work has been supported by fellowships, from, among others, the Yad HaNadiv/Beracha Foundation, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Vidal Sassoon Institute and Lady Davis Trust of the Hebrew University. He is currently at work on a new book about the Jewish underground in Algiers during World War II currently entitled Freeing the Empire: The Jewish Uprising That Helped the Allies Win the War.
Richard C. Keller is Robert Turell Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. He is the author of Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 and Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa, and is co-editor of Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties; Enregistrer les morts, identifier les surmortalités. Une comparaison Angleterre, Etats-Unis et France; and a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, “Life after Biopolitics.” He is currently writing a global history of the environment, which is under contract with Oxford University Press. He is the winner of the 2013 William Koren, Jr. Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the French Ministry of Health, and the City of Paris.
Neil Kodesh is the Allan H. Selig Distinguished Leadership Professor and Chair of the Department of History at UW-Madison. His research and teaching interests center on medical history, historical anthropology, and multidisciplinary methodologies for writing African history, with a particular emphasis on the Great Lakes region. His book, Beyond the Royal Gaze, won the African Studies Association’s Best Book Prize for the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English. He is currently working on an historical ethnography of Mengo Hospital, the first hospital established in present-day Uganda, and a history of infectious disease research in western Uganda. Kodesh previously served as Director of the African Studies Program at UW-Madison for six years.
Alan Krinsky is the Director of Research & Fiscal Policy at the Economic Progress Institute (EPI), a progressive, nonprofit, nonpartisan, research, education, and advocacy organization focused on state-level public policy in Rhode Island. EPI, formerly called The Poverty Institute, focuses on issues of concern to low-income and modest-income Rhode Islanders. Alan’s portfolio includes revenue, taxation, the minimum wage, predatory lending, and supervision over the organization’s major reports. Studying under Professors Suzanne Desan and Thomas Broman, Alan earned his PhD in History and the History of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001, with a doctoral dissertation titled Let Them Eat Horsemeat!: Science, Philanthropy, State, and the Search for Complete Nutrition in Nineteenth-Century France. After teaching Culture & Food and Critical Thinking to culinary students for two years as an adjunct professor, Alan returned to school and earned an MPH from Brown University (2006). He worked in healthcare data analytics for over a decade before starting his public policy career in 2019. Over the years, Alan has published in a variety of print and online outlets, and in 2020 his book Running in Good Faith: Observant Judaism and Libertarian Politics was published by Academic Studies Press.
Emma Kuby is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An intellectual, political, and cultural historian of modern Europe, she specializes in France and its empire. Her research focuses on the legacies of World War II’s violence during the era of decolonization. Her first book, Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945, examined an activist campaign by French and other European Nazi camp survivors to expose ongoing crimes against humanity in the postwar world. Political Survivors received the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association, the David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies, and the Council for European Studies Book Award. Emma is currently at work on a new book about American Jews in France and North Africa, 1945–55. Emma did not attend graduate school at University of Wisconsin-Madison or Stanford, but she has counted Lou Roberts as a mentor for over fifteen years. Since joining the UW faculty in 2023, she has also come to rely on Suzanne Desan and Laird Boswell as treasured interlocutors about teaching, research, and campus life. She is deeply honored to participate in this conference.
Alice Kwok studied History at UW-Madison under the supervision of Suzanne Desan with the support of Lou Roberts and Laird Boswell. Her dissertation examined the role of Old Norse literary texts as objects of a new, reactionary fascination within French medieval studies during the long nineteenth century. She is broadly interested in the role of media and historical memory in negotiating French political culture after the Revolution of 1789.
Johanna Lanner-Cusin is currently the Dean of Faculty at College Prep, an independent school in Oakland, CA. She is responsible for hiring, coaching, and supporting a faculty of 46 classroom teachers. She also works closely with other senior administrators—Deans of Students and Academics, Directors of Admissions, College Counseling, and Advancement—to set the strategic direction for the school and make decisions about day-to-day operations. Johanna left Madison in 2015 with an ABD in twentieth-century US History. Before moving into an administrative role she was a full-time classroom teacher and/or department head for 6 years. Johanna thanks Lou and Suzanne for everything that they taught her about teaching, history, thinking, and specifically gender and the French Revolution. These gifts may have been more obviously useful in the classroom but they continue to infuse her work in valuable and surprising ways. She lives in Berkeley with her wife, Siobhan, daughter Ffion, and cat Ralf.
Tom Lekan graduated from UW-Madison in 1999, where he focused on Central Europe, studied French history with Laird and Suzanne, and kept his “borderland” ties by focusing on the Rhineland for his dissertation. He is currently a Professor of History and an affiliate in the School of the Earth, Ocean and Environment at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC. He is the author of Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945 and Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti. He is currently co-writing Green Germany: The Local Roots of Global Sustainability with political scientist Carol Hager (Bryn Mawr College). His longer-term research focuses on wildlife management, postcolonial state-building, and pastoralist land rights in former German colonial territories of East and Southern Africa.
Jody LePage is an independent author. After finishing an MA in French Language and Literature at UW-Milwaukee in 1985, she worked as a Lecturer in the French Department there for the next four years, then joined the UW-Madison French History program full-time, with the late Ed Gargan as advisor until his retirement in 1992. She also worked with Suzanne Desan, who guided her through the completion of the PhD in 1998. After graduating, she worked with Sylvia Bell White, an African-American friend whose brother had been killed by the police, to tell her life story in an audiotaped oral history autobiography. The project culminated in the 2013 publication of Sister: An African American Life in Search of Justice, which won the Wisconsin State Historical Society’s “Book of Merit Award” in 2014. How that project unfolded is the subject of her “Historians in the Wild” roundtable presentation, entitled, “Out of My Field.”
Abigail Lewis is Executive Director of the Council of European Studies. She received PhD in Modern European History in 2022 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was directly advised by Laird and Lou. Suzanne served on her dissertation committee and was a mentor throughout her graduate career. Abby’s scholarship focuses on visual culture, photography, and the politics of memory in World War II and postwar Europe. She researches how art, photographs, and material culture provide lenses into experiences of warfare and occupation. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled, Double Exposure: French Photography and Everyday Choices from Nazi Occupation to Liberation. Her book explores how photographs have shaped French collective memory since 1945. At the University of Notre Dame, she directs programs focused on the Politics of Memory, Art and War, and Diplomacy. She also teaches courses on the History of Memory in Europe and advises student research on art, memory, and war in Europe.
Rob Lewis
Rob Lewis is an associate professor of History at Cal Poly Pomona. He finished his PhD at UW-Madison in 2007; Laird was his primary advisor and mentor, and graciously tolerated Lewis’s interests in the history of French (and European) sports. Lewis also took several wonderful seminars with Suzanne; Lou arrived when he was ABD, but he still benefited from her presence on campus! All three provided invaluable support and encouragement throughout Lewis’s seven-year odyssey as a visiting professor before landing at Cal Poly Pomona. At CPP, he enjoys teaching courses on modern Europe, the history of sports and leisure, history methods and digital history. His research focuses broadly on the history of sport, urban space and identity in France and Western Europe; his first book, The Stadium Century: Sport, Spectatorship and Society in Modern France (Manchester UP, 2017) examines the history of stadiums and spectatorship in 20th-century France. He is particularly engaged in incorporating historical GIS into research and teaching. He also enjoys spending time with his two small children, as well as bike commuting, bike camping and advocating for active transportation (aka bicycling, transit and walking) in southern California.
Michael Lynn is Professor of History and Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities at Purdue University Northwest. He has published historical studies of physics, balloons, fireworks, vampires, palm reading, and spontaneous human combustion. He is currently working on the history of divination and magic. Suzanne generously helped him on his dissertation topic: popular science in the eighteenth century. Both Suzanne and Laird also offered expert advice on navigating Parisian archives and libraries (along with even more expert advice on cafés, food, wine, living arrangements, and the other necessities of survival in France).
Hunter Martin is the History Department Chair and the Director of Summer Program at St. Luke’s School, a secular independent school in New Canaan, Connecticut for grades 5-12. His role leans increasingly towards administration, though he continues to teach courses in Honors Modern World History, Advanced European History, as well as interdisciplinary senior electives. He also co-leads the Literary Scholars program. His research at UW-Madison focused on the intellectual traditions and cultural politics of Europe in the twentieth century. His dissertation explored the role of cultural institutions in cultivating intellectual culture for mainstream consumption in the postwar period, as well as the changing complexion of intellectual engagement (or socio-political commitment) in an increasingly commodity-oriented society. Hunter also attended UW-Madison as an undergraduate and couldn’t possibly do justice to the decisive role played by Laird, Lou, and Suzanne in shaping the trajectory of his education, career, and life.
Siobhan McGurk is an attorney at Fenwick & West where she advises startups and emerging companies on corporate matters, including venture capital financing, capital markets, and mergers and acquisitions. In between deals, she does a range of pro bono work. Siobhan grew up in Wales and got her MA in history from Cardiff University. She is ABD in History from UW-Madison where she worked with and taught for Lou Roberts as well as with Suzanne Desan. Her never-written dissertation would have explored the racial and gendered dynamics of blackface minstrelsy in Europe and in the European colonies. She lives in the Bay Area with her wife Johanna, daughter Ffion, and cat Ralf, but considers Madison her true American home.
Grant A. Nelsestuen’s research focuses on Roman political thought and cultural history, late Hellenistic intellectual history, and the literature of the late republic and early empire. His first monograph, Varro the Agronomist: Political Philosophy, Satire, and Agriculture in the Late Republic, offered a new way of reading De Re Rustica, the farming manual of M. Terentius Varro, as a hybridized work of philosophy, satire, and technical treatise, which enabled its author to allegorize Rome’s empire on the model of an agricultural estate and to offer up a rudimentary theory of imperialism. Grant has also published articles on Cicero, Cornelius Nepos, Vergil, Polybius, Xenophon, and Dicaearchus of Messana. Currently, he is working on a monograph on T. Pomponius Atticus, whose “apolitical” status arguably facilitated his central role in the political, social, and literary life of late Republican Rome. Grant teaches courses on Latin literature, Roman culture and politics, conspiracies in the ancient and modern worlds, and “friendship” as a philosophical, political, social, and scientific phenomenon throughout time and across cultures. Since 2023, Grant has been serving as Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities in the College of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Eric O’Connor is currently a history teacher and department chair at The Seven Hills School in Cincinnati, OH, where he has taught European and world history to high schoolers for the last seven years. Before that, he taught history at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., and was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He finished his dissertation on the history of the European Union as an advisee of Laird Boswell in 2014. Eric TA’d twice for Mary Louise Roberts and spent valuable time in seminars and beyond with Suzanne Desan.
Terrence Peterson is Associate Professor of History at Florida International University. He works on modern Europe and European empires, with a focus on decolonization, migration, and warfare. His first book, Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency, examines how French officers sought to counter demands for Algerian independence from France by transforming war into an exercise in armed social reform. His current research examines the nearly seventy-year history of the Rivesaltes Camp in southern France to understand why migrant detention camps emerged as a quintessential tool of modern governance and remain so today. Peterson’s work appears in a number of peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Contemporary History, French Politics, Culture & Society, and the Journal of North African Studies, as well as in popular outlets such as War on the Rocks and the Mosse Blog. At Wisconsin, he was co-advised by Laird and Lou, but also worked closely with Suzanne.
Louise E. Robbins
Louise E. Robbins arrived in Madison in the fall of 1989 to begin graduate work in the History of Science Department (which later merged with the History Department). Robbins finished her dissertation in 1998 and left Madison in 2001. She does not remember when she first met Suzanne, but Suzanne quickly became both a trusted academic advisor and a dear personal friend. Robbins’s research focused on natural history in eighteenth-century France, and Suzanne served on her dissertation committee. Robbins learned a great deal about French history from her and benefited from her always incisive but encouraging comments. In Madison, they lived near each other on Lake Monona and often went birdwatching together. In France, Suzanne helped Robbins learn the archives and taught her to save money by drinking an espresso at the café bar instead of at a table. Suzanne was incredibly supportive when Robbins decided to embark on a career in publishing rather than academia. Her vigor, intelligence, and kind generosity have enriched Robbins’s life immeasurably.
Mona Siegel is Professor of History at California State University, Sacramento. She attended UW-Madison from 1990-1996, studying French history with Laird and Suzanne. Her dissertation—published as The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914-1940—examined the efforts of French schoolteachers to defuse hatred and encourage international cooperation after World War I. Her second book—Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights After the First World War—is a sweeping account of women’s organizing for equality, justice, and peace around the world in 1919. The book was translated into Dutch and French editions. Her current research project is tentatively titled Gisèle and Djamila: An Unexpected Story of Justice and Sisterhood during the Algerian War for Independence. A microhistory of the Boupacha Affair of 1960-63, the book will follow lawyer Gisèle Halimi, her Algerian client Djamila Boupacha, and a support committee headed by Simone de Beauvoir and other prominent women as they attempted to hold the French military, police, and government accountable for egregious human rights abuses, including the use of rape as a weapon war. The case helps demonstrate the links between anticolonial activism and early second-wave feminism in France.
Jillian Slaight conducts nonpartisan policy and history research at the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB), where she has worked since completing her PhD in 2017. While at UW, Jill studied eighteenth-century French history with Suzanne, while also taking classes with Lou and Laird. At LRB, she has researched wide-ranging policy issues such as genetic privacy, rural broadband, and facial recognition technology. She has also had the opportunity to dig into the history of Wisconsin’s abortion laws, its first Black legislators, and (most recently) the state’s relationship with Japan. She has been fortunate to share her findings not only within state government but also on Wisconsin Public Radio, at professional conferences, and with UW-Madison classrooms.
Sarah Sussman is Curator of the French and Italian collections at Stanford Libraries and also serves as head of the team of Humanities and Area Studies librarians. In that role, she has participated on several important digital projects and collects French and Italian materials in all formats, from rare books and manuscripts to digital corpora; she also supports students and researchers in their research and teaching. She completed a PhD at Stanford with Lou, writing a dissertation on the migration of the Jews of Algeria to France. Current projects include participating in an NEH grant on preserving early primary source websites and trying to make a massive collection on the history of Paris ready for researchers.
Patrick-William Travens is currently a dissertator at UW-Madison entering his last year of writing having recently completed fieldwork along the French Atlantic coast. His dissertation, “Imperial Jacobins,” interrogates how the Haitian Revolution shaped French revolutionary politics in the metropolitan ports of Bordeaux, Brest, Nantes, and Rochefort. In these ports, revolutionaries from both sides of the Atlantic contested competing visions of imperial republicanism and transformed the meaning of race and empire for French revolutionary ideology. During his graduate studies, Suzanne has been an attentive and enthusiastic advisor. From graduate seminars to teaching, writing, applying for grants, preparing conference presentations, and navigating academia in general, Suzanne has always been generous with her time and thorough in giving advice and feedback. Working with Laird in seminar and during prelim exams has also been crucial for Patrick’s understanding of modern France and French history in the longue durée. Meeting with Laird and discussing essay drafts has helped him to navigate the grant application process and to better understand French academic culture.
David van der Linden is Assistant Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His research focuses on religious conflict, memory, and justice in early modern France. Interest in these themes was kindled by Suzanne’s brilliant lectures back in 2005, when he spent a semester in Madison as an exchange student and took her course on the history of France from Louis XIV until Napoleon. David vividly remembers her lecturing on Huguenot refugees, which became the topic of his PhD dissertation, published in 2015 as Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680–1700. He continued on the path of French history ever since. Recently, David finished his second book project, Divided by Memory: The Legacy of the Wars of Religion in Early Modern France. This book explores how Catholics and Protestants in seventeenth-century France remembered the religious wars, and how such memories could undermine religious coexistence in local communities. He is currently PI of the five-year research project “Building Peace: Transitional Justice in Early Modern France,” funded by the Dutch Research Council. The team analyses the impact of peacebuilding mechanisms in the aftermath of the French Wars of Religion, including peace commissioners, bipartisan courts, and the granting of reparations and amnesty. David would never have guessed that a seed sown by Suzanne almost two decades ago would lead to a career in French history!
Javier Samper Vendrell is Assistant Professor of German Studies and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on LGBTQ+ history, film, literature, and print culture in the early twentieth century. He received a PhD in Modern European History at UW-Madison in 2015, where he wrote a dissertation under Lou Robert’s supervision. His first book was The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic. Javier is currently working on a second monograph, tentatively titled Fear of the Bogeyman: Children, Queerness, and Monsters in German Culture. The book argues that the bogeyman has long served as an effective tool to compel children to be obedient. Drawing upon LGBTQ+ studies, childhood and youth studies, as well as film and literary studies, he contends that adults also rely on this figure to quell children’s curiosity about gender and sexuality.