This research group is devoted to the history and politics of English-speaking countries, using methodological tools from social, intellectual and cultural history to ask questions about political identities and political subjectivities, and about the interconnectedness of politics and everyday life. History is understood in a longue durée, with scholars working on the 17th century to the 21st century. The aim of our group is stimulate interdisciplinary research across the social sciences and develop work cutting across time periods, questioning the nature of an ‘English-speaking’ world and its boundaries and looking at its links to the wider world.
Statement for Larca website:
Members of the history research group, LARCA (UMR 8225, Université de Paris – CNRS)
The group’s research is organised around five main themes:
- The Atlantic World and the first age of globalization, 1600-1850
- Migrations, discriminations, ethnic and racial inequalities
- International policies and diplomatic networks in the Anglophone worlds
- Constructing national identities and national myths
- Democracy, democratisation and politicization in North America and the United Kingdom
The group has close connections with the research group on gender and the different transversal groups (Writing history from the margins; popular classes; material culture) which stem from the History group.
Director:
Stéphanie Prévost et Daniel Foliard
Research seminar:
Political History Seminar – Peripheral Knowledges
Website:
https://histpol.hypotheses.org/category/actualites
Members:
Clarisse Berthezène is an historian focusing on modern Britain and specializing in the socio-cultural and intellectual history of politics. She worked on the history of conservatism with a transnational perspective. Her initial research centred on the history of Conservative intellectuals in the interwar period as well as in the post-war period. She has worked on the political mobilization of women and on the links between voluntary associations and political parties. She currently oversees a European COST project -“Who cares in Europe ?”- which brings together scholars from 25 European countries to tackle the history of social welfare throughout a long 20th century and question the notion of a “social European model”. She is also involved in a comparative study of the political mobilizations of women in Europe and the role of social action in their political trajectory. Together with Jean-Christian Vinel, she is working on a research project on the working class in Britain, France and the United States.
Marine Bellégo is a historian of science who specializes in the 18th and 19th century, the British Empire and India. She has worked on the history of the Calcutta Botanic Garden in the 19th century, considering this garden as an imperial microcosm through which could be studied various colonial tensions. A book on the same topic is being prepared for publication with the scientific services of the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle. She takes part in research projects about collections of natural objects, colonial censuses, imperial archives, ocean studies and the history of paper as a material.
“Slavery, Empires and Diplomacy : France, Great-Britain and the United States in the Atlantic World, (c.1795-c.1815)”
thesis defended on January 12, 2021
Supervised by: Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (supervisor) and Allan Potofsky (co-supervisor)
Laura Carter is a specialist in the social, economic, and cultural history of twentieth-century Britain. Her research focuses on popular culture, education, and social change. She has written about the origins of popular social history in Britain after 1918 and its relationship to the education system and pedagogical ideas. She is now working on the secondary education of girls and women in Britain after 1945, and the relationship between their education and their working and family lives.
Laurence Cros is a specialist of Canada. She studies the interactions between history writing and the construction of national identity as well as how different facets of Canadian identity are expressed through that country’s foreign and immigration policies. In addition to her research on Canadian national identity, she is currently working on the notion of historical fiction.
François de Chantal is a specialist of American political institutions, especially the US Congress, the electoral system, and American political parties. Between 2012 enad 2019, he was co-director (with Dr. Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer) of a political science journal on American politics, “Politique Américaine” he is now a member of the editorial board. He also sits on the editorial board of IDEAS, the Institute of the Americas’ online journal. In 2020, he published an edited volume by Edinburgh University Press entitled “Obama’s Fractured Legacies. The Politics and Policies of an Embattled Presidency” . He is involved in two collective projects on American political parties: the first is about the “culture of defiance” in public life and the other on parties’ use of “Big Data” during elections. He is also working on a book comparing the American and French republican traditions, starting with their shared presidentialist turns (i.e. the New Deal in the U.S. and the Fifth Republic in France).
Bénédicte Deschamps is a specialist of immigration history in the United States, especially the history of Italian Americans, as well as the ethnic press and eugenics. She is currently working on Italian political immigration to the United States in the 19th century and her book, La presse italo-américaine de Risorgimento à la Grande Guerre, will soon be published.
Véronique Elefteriou-Perrin is a specialist of the history of American cinema, the use of images in wartime and the representations of Jewish communities in American visual culture. She is currently working on “filmdom” in the context of the Great War and the inter-war years in the United States.
- Foliard Daniel, PR
- Imperial and colonial history
- History of photography
- History of cartography
- Visual AI and early conflict photography
- Photographic encounters and exchanges in imperial and colonial contexts
Ariane Fennetaux is a specialist of material culture with a particular emphasis on clothes and textiles. She has just published a book co-authored with Barbara Burman and entitled The Pocket : A Hidden History of Women’s Lives 1660-1900 (Yale University Press, 2019). She is currently working on the history of clothes and textiles in a global context and is the main investigator of the Global Matters collaborative research project which focuses on the global history of material culture and technology.
Research themes:
- Anti-racism and race relations in the Caribbean and in mainland France
- Nationalism, ethnicity and identity politics in the Caribbean
- Dance, traditionalism and folklore
- Gender and LGBTQ+ Studies
- Slavery and memory policies in the Caribbean and in mainland France
John-Erik Hansson is currently editing his thesis, entitled “To Teach Every Principle of the Infidels and Republicans”? William Godwin Through His Children’s Books, for publication as a monograph. In this work, he shows how Godwin continued his political activities in the early 19th century by writing children’s books. His also works on a new history of the concept of imagination in Britain in the long 18th century, by placing Britain in a transnational context. His third project seeks to shed new light on the history of anarchist thought and anarchism as a political ideology. I’m investigating how English-language anarchists rewrote the history of anarchist thought and reappropriated anarchist figures (including William Godwin) in the 20th century.
Catherine Lejeune is a specialist of immigration history in the 20th and 21st century, the American immigration system, the informal citizenship of illegal immigrants, urban migration and diversity. Her initial research focused on the process of identification of Mexican immigrants living near the border between the United States and Mexico. Her recent work analyzes the evolution of the American immigration policy and its consequences for illegal immigrants. She is also interested in the political mobilization of young undocumented immigrants who contribute to the debate on new forms of citizenship. Together with D. Pagès-El Karoui, C. Schmoll and H. Thiollet, she is co-editing a volume entitled Migration and Cosmopolitanism in a Globalised World: Situating Urbanity in Comparative Perspectives, which is to be published in 2019.
Charles-Edouard Levillain is a specialist of Anglo-Dutch relations between 1650 and 1750 and the “Grand Siècle” in Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands (1850-1950). He is currently working on a monograph focusing on “The Life & Times of Marlborough” by Churchill.
Ariane Mak is a specialist of labour history and the history of the British working class. Her doctoral research focused on coal miners’ strikes in wartime Britain. She is currently researching the politics of everyday life through two projects: the first one examines wartime political graffiti; the second one explores the links between deindustrialisation and the Leave vote in the British coalfields. She is also interested in the social history of knowledge, and especially in the history of Mass-Observation and in British oral history.
- Meigs Mark, PR
Mark Meigs specialises on American history and culture. His particular interests are the changes in the society and cultural institutions of the United States between the Civil War and World War II. He has written a historical geography of the museums of Philadelphia in which those institutions reflect the changing social and political realities of the city. He is also co-editor of the online publication Arts of War and Peace.
Allan Potofsky is a specialist of Atlantic history, the history of the American and French revolutions, and urban history in the eighteenth century. He is currently working on a book project Paris is the World (17th-18th century) funded by a CNRS fellowship (section 33) and has previously published Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; paperback edition, 2012).
Dr Stéphanie Prévost is a historian of long-19th-century Britain, in particular of Ottoman-British relations that she situates at the crossroads of British domestic, foreign and imperial policy and that she analyses in its more global interconnections. In 2019, she co-edited a volume with Prof Anna Caiozzo & Dr Laurent Dedryvère) on transhistoric and global imaginings of the Turan & “Central Asia” (Le Touran : entre mythes, orientalisme et construction identitaire, Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes). Her interest in little examined political spaces, combined with an approach from below, has also led her to research table and gift diplomacy (following trends in new diplomatic history) and to develop an expertise on the foreign-language press (within the Transfopress network https://www.chcsc.uvsq.fr/transfopress). Together with Bénédicte Deschamps (Université Paris Cité), she co-curated the “Language Matters” exhibition in 2017-8, which retraced the history of the English-language press published in France since 1760. Her research is now geared towards 19th-early 20th-century histories of humanitarianism and liberal internationalisms as part of the junior fellowship of the Institut universitaire de France she was recently awarded. In particular, she examines non-state actors’ contributions to crafting international ideas and practices of refuge in the late 1890s-early 1900s and sees the latter as a solid contribution to the emergence of a first international refugee regime in the immediate aftermath of WW1.
Marie-Jeanne Rossignol is a specialist of antislavery in North America from the Revolution to the Civil War. She co-directed the collective project entitled Ecrire l’histoire depuis les marges between 2013 and 2016. She is currently working on a book written in French presenting the question of antislavery in the United States between 1776 and 1830.
- Ruiz Marie, MCF
- Migration history
- Gender history
- British history
Marie Ruiz research focuses on the history of migration from a gender perspective. She is currently working on the history of colonial training centers for British migrants, in a transdisciplinary approach that combines the history of migration, education, agriculture and science. This project examines the history of social practices through the training of male and female migrants in the metropole and in the colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries. It unveils women’s progressive access to scientific education. Another research project concerns female migrant letters spanning one hundred years of organized emigration by British female emigration societies (1860-1960).
Paul Schor is a specialist of the social history of the United States, especially the history of minorities, immigration and segregation. He also works on the history of consumer culture and contemporary music. He is currently researching the making of American identity (1860-1945), focusing on the role of standardization, the creation of everyday norms, and the integration of minority and rural consumers in the national market.
Jean-Christian Vinel is a specialist of political history in the United States in the 20th century, the history of professional relations and labor laws (19th and 20th centuries), the history of Conservative movements since the New Deal, and the history of the state. He is currently working on a book entitled “Reaction at Work: The Right, Labor, and the Making of the New Gilded Age, 1935-2008” which offers a new interpretation of labor history in the United States. Together with Clarisse Berthezène, he is working on a research project on the working classes in Britain, France and the United States.
Doctoral students
Anna Audo is currently working on her dissertation entitled: “Fashion and collective becomings in British and American fashion curation,” under the supervision of Catherine Bernard and Ariane Fennetaux.
Patrice Dallaire is a career diplomat who has worked in Canada and abroad. He studied international relations, diplomacy, and foreign languages. He is currently a diplomat in residence at the Ecole supérieure d’études internationales (ESEI) affiliated with the Université Laval. His research focuses on the relationships between the United States and Lower Canada during the Jacksonian era, as well as the formation of regional identity in New England between 1789 and the decline of the Federalist party in the 1820s.
Nicolas Garnier is currently working on his dissertation entitled: “In Him, there is no male or female: le statut des femmes missionnaires britanniques au sein de la China Inland Mission: innovation, pragmatisme et conformisme, 1875-1914,” under the supervision of Myriam Boussahba-Bravard.
James Guttridge is currently working on his thesis entitled ‘Ex Uno Plures: Audience Fragmentation and Political Polarisation in The West Wing, The Shield, and The Good Fight’ under the direction of Ariane Hudelet and François Vergniolle de Chantal.
- Hadroug Jihed
Jihed Hadroug is currently working on his dissertation entitled: “U.S. Public Diplomacy in MENA: A study of the Fulbright exchange program in Tunisia” under the supervision of François Vergniolle de Chantal.
Ali Hatapçi is currently working on his dissertation entitled: “Vulgarisation scientifique dans/par les périodiques britanniques au 19ème siècle (c.1860-c.1880),” under the supervision of Myriam Boussahba-Bravard.
Dissertation Topic: Masculinities and class identities in the United Kingdom, 1900-1939, an autobiographical inquiry, supervised by: Clarisse Berthezène (Université de Paris) and Ben Griffin (Cambridge)
- Lattanzio Gabriel
Gabriel Lattanzio is currently working on his dissertation entitled: “Syndicalisme et immigration aux Etats-Unis de 1964 à 2000,” under the supervision of Mark Meigs.
- Leroch Marion
Marion Leroch is currently working on her dissertation entitled: “La citoyenneté à l’épreuve des corps: la campagne nationale et internationale contre les Contagious Diseases Acts et son héritage immediate, 1864-1914,” under the supervision of Myriam Boussahba-Bravard.
- Malet Julie
Julie Malet is currently working on her dissertation entitled: “Parler Vrai: la crise du professionnalisme politique au sein du Parti républicain (2008-2016),” under the supervision of François Vergniolle de Chantal.
- Mallet Audrey
Audrey Mallet is currently working on her dissertation entitled: “Les rapports médiatiques dans la jeune république américaine et le débat britannique sur la Révolution française. Production, diffusion et réception des idées républicaines dans le monde atlantique révolutionnaire, 1791-1815,” under the supervision of Allan Potofsky.
- Rakoto André
She is working on her dissertation in American Political Science entitled: “A new progressive wave? The challenges of grassroots funding in post-2016 congressional elections”, supervised by François Vergniolle de Chantal (LARCA) and Olivier Richomme (Triangle, Lyon 2).
- Simony Lauriane
Lauriane Simony is currently working on her dissertation entitled: “Le British Council en Birmanie (1948-1962): la politique linguistique et diplomatie culturelle,” under the supervision of Pauline Schnapper and Mélanie Torrent.
Dissertation topic : The Women’s Refuge Movement in the United Kingdom, 1971-2000
Supervised by: Clarisse Berthezène (Université de Paris) et Natalie Thomlinson (University of Reading)
.
- Viarnes-Ward Véronique
Véronique Viarnes-Ward is currently working on her thesis entitled: “La nébuleuse associative de protection de la nature et des animaux et ses réseaux en Grande-Bretagne, 1870-1950,” under the supervision of Clarisse Berthezène.
