Demande envoyée! Merci bien pour les conseils @rebeccapscales.bsky.social et @valeriedeacon.bsky.social !

Q for Historians: there's a document about the creation of a memorial that is housed in the archives of the Ville de Paris that I'd like to access. It is from ~10 years ago, and the "conditions d'accès" = "50 ans (vie privée)." Is it remotely reasonable to request a dérogation?

Un tas de nouveaux livres! (Less happy about the shipping rates from France, though, after the discounted book rate went away last year...)

Digital technologies can be obviously dreadfully destructive, but also really wondrous tools for good. Their sheer generality is both strength and weakness. How do we bend them toward humanism and away from the soul-deadening traps they often become? v5.chriskrycho.com/essays/comp...

My History colleagues are looking for a Europeanist who can also teach in a non-Western area. I'd personally be enthusiastic about another French speaker joining the college. We have a lovely Francophone community of faculty and students, and there are French lunches on campus twice a month!

From @emilyherring.bsky.social Emily Herring’s book Herald of a Restless World, it seems to me that Henri Bergson’s words offer the strongest argument for why we still need the humanities in an increasingly technological world.

Job Announcement: Professor Modern European History (1750-Present), open rank, beginning in Fall 2026 at Grove City College, a small Christian liberal arts college an hour north of Pittsburgh. Preference for someone who can also teach courses in a non-Western field. www.gcc.edu/Utility/Port...

On this D-Day anniversary, here are some pictures from my recent trip to Normandy. The visit to the American cemetery and the beaches was a profoundly moving reminder of the sacrifices of so many in the name of freedom.

A belated thank you to @plough.bsky.social for sending me a t-shirt in December! I'm revisiting the Winter issue this week during my spring break as I think about ways to improve my classes during the second half of the semester.

If you are writing your PhD within the expansive realm of memory studies, this might be a call for you: www.mnemonics.ugent.be/news/call-fo...

"The simplest framing of what is wrong with MAiD is that it leads to the government operating two competing suicide hotlines, and being, at best, indifferent about which one you call." thedispatch.com/article/an-i...

Went to this last night with a friend. Wilson's public performance was wonderful (including recitations in ancient Greek!). Unexpected bonus: there was a book signing afterward.

View from my office today.

Emily Wilson will be giving a public reading from her translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey on Friday in Pittsburgh! Tickets are free for students and teachers of literature. I'm so looking forward to this. www.eventbrite.com/e/internatio...

And the government falls...

Pour mon cours sur la France contemporaine aujourd'hui!

It’s been a true joy to me that this piece I wrote some years ago continues to be relevant in the present. It’s on one of my very favourite themes in the whole liturgical year: the light of Christ dawning into the world’s shadows.

Currently reading, as I revise a course on Algerian history for the spring semester. She was a Kabyle Christian convert, a poet, and a mother of authors Jean Amrouche and Taos Amrouche.

Et pour clore ce petit parcours dans les galanteries XVIIIe siècle, ceci ! En vrai cela parle de tout et de rien, en vers ou en prose, on ne sçait pas bien… Mais la page de titre est fabuleuse !

Ça c’est de la dédicace !

Tomorrow! Still plenty of time to register!

H-France Forum is pleased to announce the publication of vol. 19:7, edited by Venita Datta, Wellesley College. This issue is devoted to Julian Jackson, France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain. Cambridge, MA, & London: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2023. ISBN 978-0-674-24889-2 (hb).

Un peu d'art nouveau pour vous ce matin. Source: La Plante et ses Applications Ornementales : sous la direction de M. Eugène Grasset. 1896. Bibliothèque nationale de France. gallica.bnf.fr

Trying this out, but honestly debating just getting off of social media all together. However, I appreciate the book recs and research updates within the scholarly community, which is what I valued when I joined Twitter years ago.

Excerpt from Charles Péguy's "On the Porch of the Mystery of the Second Virtue" (1918). My translation.