Reminder-Baithak with Professor Caroline Ford - December 13, 2:00 pm, Committee Room, History Dept., DU

[niharika]

Dear all,

This is to invite you for the second ‘Baithak’ of this academic year with Dr. Caroline Ford, Professor in the History of Modern France, University of California, Los Angeles. The 'baithak is scheduled for tuesday, 13th December,  2011, at 2:00 pm in the History Department, Committee Room, School of Social Sciences, Delhi University.

If you recall the 'Baithak' was conceived as a site for discussing a historian's work through pre-circulated papers. It provides the historian with an opportunity to make an introductory statement regarding her/his past and present research, and a context wherein the pre-circulated papers demonstrate the historiographical concerns of the author.

For her baithak Professor Ford would like to discuss questions and ideas from her forthcoming book which deals with the transformation of environmental sensibilities in France between 1840 and 1940, which will be published by Harvard University Press as Nature and Artifice: Culture and Conservation in Metropolitan and Colonial France. And a new project on representing France's colonial past or coming to terms (or not) with France's colonial legacies in the contemporary period--primarily through the prism of France's new museums, founded from the late 90s to the present.

Prof. Ford has chosen the following articles for discussion:

"Museums After Empire in Metropolitan and Overseas France," Journal of Modern History 83, no. 3 (September 2010): 625-61.

"Reforestation, Landscape Conservation, and the Anxieties of Empire in French Colonial Algeria" American Historical Review (April, 2008): 341-362. Winner of the William Koren, Jr. Prize, 2009.

"Nature's Fortunes: New Directions in European Environmental History," Journal of Modern History (March 2007).

For your convenience, the required readings are also attached with this letter. They are also available at the M.Phil. Google site : https://sites.google.com/site/dumphilhistory2011/home/baithak-announcements

About our speaker: Professor Caroline Ford completed her Ph.D. in European history at the University of Chicago and taught at Harvard University (1988-1995), and then at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada (1995-2004) before joining UCLA as professor of history in July 2004. Her first book, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton University Press, 1993) explores religion, nation formation, and the creation of regional and religious identities in France at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her second book, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Cornell University Press, 2005), focuses on the feminization of religion in post-revolutionary France and its impact on the civil/political status of women and the creation of a distinctive laïc republican political culture by the early twentieth century.