Description

After he asserted direct control of New France in the 1660s, Louis XIV’s authority was largely unrestricted. As scholars of his reign have pointed out in relation to the political legitimacy of his regime in France itself, the manufactured symbols of Louis XIV’s kingship finessed the contradictions between his centralization of authority and his continued reliance on local elites. In the case of an overseas colony, there was no possibility that the king would ever favour his distant subjects with his presence. The monarch could be nothing but representation. This paper looks at the representations of monarchical authority in various media: paintings and prints, a statue in Lower Town Québec, currency and medals, and the legal system. The distance of the colony meant in some cases relying on expedients to govern the French population.

Dr. Colin Coates teaches Canadian Studies and History at Glendon College, York University. He has published on the history of rural society in the St Lawrence Valley (The Metamorphosis of Landscape and Community in Early French Canada) and on the history of commemoration (Heroines and History: Representations of Madeleine de Verchères and Laura Secord, with Cecilia Morgan). He is currently working on studies of political culture in Louis XIV’s New France and the environmental history of Québec. He recently co-edited The Nature of Canada, with Graeme Wynn.

Description

Zosa Szajkowski, a Polish-born Jewish historian, took tens of thousands of Jewish documents from Europe in the 1940s and ‘50s and moved them, illicitly, to New York. He eventually sold them to Jewish research libraries in the United States and Israel. Was this a heroic act of salvage, or simply theft?

Join us for a lecture by Lisa Leff, author of The Archive Thief, Professor of History at American University, and Director of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The event will be moderated by Doris Bergen, with responses by Eric Jennings and Sara R. Horowitz.

A reception will precede the event, starting at 3:30 pm.

Description

Few events in the French twentieth century have been as richly commemorated as May ’68. May’s fiftieth anniversary in 2018 provoked a veritable commemorative frenzy, with five major exhibitions in the Paris region alone. These shows were accompanied by new books by leading French scholars, re-editions of classic texts, commemorative magazines, an online exhibit at the Nanterre campus of the Université de Paris, and two outdoor poster displays in central Paris. This illustrated talk examines the capital’s fiftieth anniversary exhibitions on May ‘68 in the context of recent scholarship on the event and its commemorative history, as well as on 1960s youth. It pays particular attention to the shows mounted by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Archives nationales, and the municipality of Paris, the last of which aestheticized the events and ended by funneling visitors into a shop selling May-themed souvenirs, including commemorative paving stones priced at 280 or 380 euros.

Susan Whitney is Associate Professor of History at Carleton University, where she also served as Associate Dean (Undergraduate Affairs) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences from 2008 to 2011 and 2015 to 2017.  An historian of youth, she is the author of Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Duke, 2009).  She is preparing a chapter on 1960s youth culture for the Routledge Handbook of French History and has a chapter in A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). In 2018, Professor Whitney received Carleton’s Graduate Mentoring Award for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Description

This event will be conducted partially in English and partially in French.

De l’Histoire naturelle de Buffon au Regnum Animale d’Arnout Vosmaer: Scientific Rivalry between France and the Dutch Republic at the End of the Old Regime

Après un doctorat en médecine vétérinaire (DMV) obtenu en 1992 à l’Université de Montréal,Swann Paradis a exercé la médecine vétérinaire (animaux de compagnie) au Québec pendant plusde 15 ans, parallèlement à ses études littéraires. Ses champs d’intérêt incluent l’histoire naturelleau XVIIIe siècle (littérature, philosophie et sciences), de même que le « roman terrifiant » et le« Romantisme noir », la poésie québécoise et franco-ontarienne contemporaine et l’écriturepoétique. Il prépare actuellement une monographie qui devrait paraître quelque part au XXIe sièclechez Hermann, dont le titre provisoire est : Le sixième sens de la taupe. Buffon dans la fabriquedes quadrupèdes. Il travaille actuellement sur un projet de recherche ayant reçu l’appui d’une« Subvention Savoir » du CRSH (2016-2020), pour le projet intitulé : « De la ménagerie du Princed’Orange au Jardin du Roi : Arnout Vosmaer (1720-1799) dans l’ombre de Buffon (1707-1788) ».