Programme 2023-2024

Les séances ont lieu, sauf indication contraire, le jeudi de 17h à 18h30 à la Maison de la Recherche de Sorbonne Université (28 rue Serpente, Paris 6e), salle D421

Jeudi 5 octobre 2023 : Séance pédagogique sur les ressources en ligne en histoire britannique (Fabrice Bensimon, Stéphane Jettot et Frédérique Lachaud)

Jeudi 19 octobre : Louise Jackson (Edimbourg), ‘Gender equalities at work: writing an interdisciplinary history of feminist campaigning in the UK c. 1970-2020’

Jeudi 9 novembre : John Tolan (Nantes), ‘England’s Jews in the 13th century’

Jeudi 23 novembre : William Ashworth (Liverpool) : ‘The Early Chemical Industry in North West England and Its Legacy’

Jeudi 7 décembre : Emily Ward (Edimbourg), ‘”I witness this myself”: adolescent rulers and political “belonging” in Britain and France, c. 1150 –c. 1260’

Jeudi 21 décembre : Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq (Nanterre), sur son livre La République de Harrington dans la France des Lumières et de la Révolution (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2023)

Jeudi 1er février 2024 : Béatrice Robic (Nanterre) : « Le travail des enfants en Angleterre et au pays de Galles entre 1870 et 1914 »

Jeudi 8 février : Luke Blaxill (Oxford), ‘Text Mining and Political History: challenges and opportunities in the age of Big Data’

Jeudi 15 février : Thomas Stammers (Durham): ‘Philippe, comte de Paris and the Orleans family in Exile after 1848: Liberalism, Collecting and Empire’

Jeudi 29 février: Alison Cathcart (Stirling) : ‘James VI & I and his empire of islands’

Jeudi 14 mars : Perry Gauci (Oxford) : ‘London Private Bankers in Eighteenth-Century Society’

Jeudi 28 mars : Lauriane Simony (Cergy) : « Diplomatie culturelle, stratégies d’influence et propagande : le British Council en Birmanie après l’indépendance »

Jeudi 4 avril : Sophie Scott-Brown (East Anglia), ‘The Impolitics of Internationalism: Claude Bourdet, G. D. H. Cole, and the International Society for Socialist Studies’

Jeudi 25 avril : James Fisher (Exeter), autour de son ouvrage The Enclosure of Knowledge. Books, Power and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2022)

Jeudi 16 maiOphélie Siméon (Sorbonne Nouvelle), « Anna Doyle Wheeler (1785-1848): itinéraire politique et militant d’une pionnière du féminisme »

 

Le séminaire est ouvert aux étudiants de master et doctorat, ainsi qu’à toutes les personnes intéressées. Les enregistrements de la plupart des communications sont ensuite disponibles sur la chaine YouTube du séminaire :  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCveumFeGDtmJP8GTG3S8DOQ

Sally Holloway, ‘Food, Family & Feeling: Edible Gifts and the Making of Marriage in Georgian England’ (11 mai)

Jeudi 11 mai à 17h (Serpente, salle D421)

Sally Holloway, ‘Food, Family & Feeling: Edible Gifts and the Making of Marriage in Georgian England’

It is well established that the navigation of courtship in Georgian England was shaped by a range of romantic gifts including ribbons, rings, garters, gloves, and portrait miniatures, which helped to generate feelings of love and shepherd courting couples toward the altar. Yet these were not the only items which couples had at their disposal: in Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), it is the humble walnut which enables the farmer Robert Martin to express his admiration for the heroine’s protégée Harriet Smith, while in Pride & Prejudice (1813) it is the beautiful pyramids of hothouse fruits and hospitality at Pemberley which first lead Elizabeth Bennet to realise her love for Mr Darcy. Such edible offerings are largely absent from scholarship on courtship in Georgian England, though they were likely among the most common material objects routinely exchanged by and shared between couples.

This paper sets out how courting couples orchestrated their relationships using a breath of edible gifts from cakes and sweetmeats to apricots, peaches, pineapples, melons, duck, pork, venison, turbot, oysters, and sturgeon. These sweet treats, fruits, meats, and fish could variously be deployed as a means of flirtation, to gauge early romantic interest, underscore the status and generosity of the giver, show investment in the bodily health of the recipient as a future spouse, and bind two families together before matrimony. Together, they add a crucial dimension to our understanding of the widely recognised ‘gift mode’ during courtship, illuminate the mechanics of courtship as rooted in family homes and gardens, and the new spaces of the metropolitan public sphere, and demonstrate how natural or perishable items such as food could operate as powerful vehicles for emotional meaning.

Dr Sally Holloway is a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow in History and History of Art at Oxford Brookes University. She specialises in histories of emotions, gender, and visual and material culture in Britain over the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the co-editor of Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History (Oxford, 2018), and the author of The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions and Material Culture (Oxford, 2019) which has recently been released in paperback (2022). 

Florence Petroff : « La question américaine en Écosse : penser la britannicité à l’échelle de l’empire dans les années 1770 » (30 mars)

Jeudi 30 mars à 17h :

Florence Petroff (La Rochelle) : « La question américaine en Écosse : penser la britannicité à l’échelle de l’empire dans les années 1770 »

La guerre qui oppose la Grande-Bretagne à ses treize colonies d’Amérique du Nord à partir d’avril 1775 déclenche une « guerre de papier » entre pamphlétaires britanniques qui s’opposent sur la légitimité de la révolte des colons et les mesures à adopter vis-à-vis des colonies rebelles. En Écosse, les élites condamnent presqu’à l’unanimité les prétentions des colons américains à l’autonomie au sein de l’empire, puis à l’indépendance. 

Il s’agit ici d’explorer le discours écossais sur la question américaine, d’en définir les contours et de le replacer dans le débat sur la crise impériale en Grande-Bretagne ainsi qu’à l’échelle atlantique. Nous nous interrogerons sur les conceptions de l’empire et de l’identité britannique qui s’affirment dans ce discours, afin d’en évaluer la spécificité écossaise. Nous poserons ainsi la question de la place de la Révolution américaine dans le processus de fabrication de leur identité britannique par les Écossais, et plus largement de ce que l’Amérique a représenté pour ces Britanniques du Nord qui, à l’inverse des Américains, font le choix de l’intégration au prix de leur souveraineté en tant que nation. Cette intervention propose ainsi une approche atlantique de la révolution américaine, étudiée au prisme de sa réception et de son interprétation en Écosse. 

———

Florence Petroff est maîtresse de conférences en histoire moderne à l’université de La Rochelle. Sa thèse de doctorat sera prochainement publiée aux éditions Honoré Champion, sous le titre « La Révolution américaine et l’Écosse : regards croisés (1765-1783) ». Ses travaux portent sur la circulation des idées et des représentations au sein du monde britannique ainsi que sur les usages de l’histoire au XVIIIe siècle.

Rémy Duthille, «  Les Britanniques au miroir des révolutions de 1830 »  (16 mars)

Jeudi 16 mars  à 17h : Rémy Duthille (Bordeaux Montaigne), «  Les Britanniques au miroir des révolutions de 1830 » 


Résumé: Des Britanniques, on le sait peu, ont célébré les révolutions européennes de 1830, dans un contexte de troubles sociaux et politiques, et de crise constitutionnelle à la veille de la réforme parlementaire de 1832. L’examen de ces célébrations s’inscrit dans l’historiographie récente dégage le caractère transnational des mouvements révolutionnaires de 1830-1834. Les multiples modalités de célébrer la révolution à l’étranger éclairent la diversité des conceptions de la révolution et de la réforme, suggèrent l’étendue de la participation politique et illustre les perceptions britanniques de la France.

Rémy Duthille est Maître de Conférences HDR à l’Université de Bordeaux-Montaigne et membre du laboratoire CLIMAS. Il a publié Le discours radical en Grande-Bretagne, 1768-1789 (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment 2017) et récemment coordonné un numéro de Leaves, “Sociability and democratic practices in Britain and Ireland, 1789-1832″  avec Magalie Fleurot et Laurence Machet. 

Joanne Paul, “Friendship, Kinship and Power: The House of Dudley in the Tudor Period” (1er déc.)

Joanne Paul, “Friendship, Kinship and Power: The House of Dudley in the Tudor Period”

Jeudi 1er décembre à 17h

In the Tudor period, power was acquired and maintained through the establishment not just of personal relationships with the monarch, but complex webs of alliances that made a dynasty – a ‘house’ – resilient against monarchical change. Many of these connections were formed with those whom would be thought of, by modern standards, distant family at best, but were decidedly considered ‘kin’ by Tudor standards. Expanding on the neo-revisionist studies of ‘family’ and ‘kinship’ in the early modern period, this talk will focus on the kinship connections formed by members of the Dudley family during the sixteenth century. It will argue that the functioning or failure of affective kinship ties played a significant part in the acquisition or loss of power to the House of Dudley in the Tudor period, drawing particular attention to affectionate male relationships, but also the ways in which the networks established by women were frequently essential to the re-establishment of the position of the family, following a breakdown in male kinship relationships. Drawing on research compiled for a public-history trade book, The House of Dudley, this talk will also experiment with methods of bridging (or eliminating, or exposing the fictionality of) the gap between ‘public’ and ‘academic’ histories.

Dr Joanne Paul is Honorary Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex, working on the intellectual, cultural and political histories of the Tudor and Renaissance periods. The House of Dudley (Penguin: Michael Joseph, 2022) is her third book and first trade book.

Bénédicte Miyamoto, “Satire & art market practices: the auction as visual trope in the eighteenth-century” (13 oct.)

Jeudi 13 octobre 2022 à 17h (salle D421 à Serpente) :

Bénédicte Miyamoto, “Satire & art market practices: the auction as visual trope in the eighteenth-century”

As auctions burst on the London scene, they became convenient shortcuts for satirists. Increasingly familiar with these urban spectacles, their actors and ‘props’, the public perceived auctions as highly volatile events rooted in consumer manipulation. Prints reverting to the tropes of the auction tended to satirize contracts between unequal parties and with power or information imbalance – from scandalous marriages to corrupt political representation. In turn, this reinforced the distrust towards connoisseurship, the collecting impulse, and the burgeoning art market.

Drawing from the collection of the British Museum and the Lewis Walpole Library, episodes of intense satire production (1730s, 1760s, and 1790s) can be identified, revealing the anxieties of the early modern to modern market transition, the intersections of the modern state and the marketplace, and the public disquiet at shifting valuations of taste and arbitration.

However, by confronting reputation to praxis, and investigating itemized bills and annotated catalogues, we gain insight into the art world’s business practices, explaining the increasing commercial success of auctions in the face of their enduring public disrepute.

Bénédicte MIYAMOTO (PhD, Université Paris Diderot) is an Associate Professor in British History at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, and a scholar of the eighteenth-century British art market and artistic professions. She has published her research in Moving Pictures: Intra-European Trade in Images De Marchi and Raux, Brepols, 2014; Marketing Art in the British Isles, Gould and Mesplède, Ashgate, 2016; Art Crossing Borders: The International Art Market in the Age of Nation States, Baetens and Lyna, Brill, 2019, and London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, Huemer and Avery-Quash, Getty 2019, Art Markets, Agents and Collectors, Turpin and Bracken, 2021. She has co-edited Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge (LWW, Brill 2020) and Art & Migration (MUP, 2021).

LAURA KING : ‘The School Case of Poor Harold: Families’ multi-generational remembrance of deceased children in twentieth-century England’ (12 mai)

Jeudi 12 mai de 17h à 18h30 – Salle D040 à Serpente

 

LAURA KING (Leeds) : ‘The School Case of Poor Harold: Families’ multi-generational remembrance of deceased children in twentieth-century England’

 

‘Poor Harold’ died in 1931, aged nearly eleven, and left behind a school case. This paper examines the story of this ‘ordinary’ boy and his family, who have chosen to preserve his memory through the keeping of this object. The paper examines the case itself, and the story associated with it, as told by Harold’s niece Maureen. In doing so, the article explores remembrance culture in interwar England and inter-generational memory cultures since, focusing on emotional practices, attitudes to death, cross-generational family identities, and changing engagement with religion and faith.

 

Latest monograph : Family Men: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Britain, c.1914-1960 (Oxford University Press, 2015)

 

Contact : Stéphane Jettot jettot@yahoo.com



Chris Manias, ‘The Age of Mammals: Nature, Development and Palaeontology in the long nineteenth century’ (14 avril)

Séminaire franco-britannique d’histoire

https://sfbh.hypotheses.org/

Maison de la Recherche, 28 rue Serpente, Paris 6e, Salle D421, de 17h à 18h30

(La séance aura lieu en présentiel uniquement. Un enregistrement sera diffusé ultérieurement sur la chaine youtube du séminaire ).

 

Jeudi 14 avril 2022 à 17h: Chris Manias (King’s College), ‘The Age of Mammals: Nature, Development and Palaeontology in the long nineteenth century

 

Abstract

When people today hear ‘paleontology,’ they immediately think of dinosaurs. However, for much of the history of the discipline, scientists and public audiences seeking dramatic demonstrations of the history of life focused on something else: the developmental history of the mammals. Assumptions that ‘the Age of Mammals’ represented the pinnacle of animal life made mammals crucial for understanding the formation (and possibly the future) of the natural world. Yet this combined with more troubling notions, that seemingly promising creatures had been swept aside in the ‘struggle for life’ or that modern biodiversity was ‘impoverished’ compared to previous eras. Why some prehistoric creatures, such as the sabre-tooth cat and ground sloth, had become extinct, while others seemed to have been the ancestors of familiar animals like elephants and horses, were questions loaded with cultural assumptions, ambiguity and trepidation. And how humans related to deep developmental processes, and whether the ‘Age of Man’ was qualitatively different from the ‘Age of Mammals,’ led to reflections on humanity’s place within the natural world.

 

This paper will outline Chris Manias’ current book project, which examines how nineteenth-century scholars, writers, artists and publics understood the developmental history of the mammals ­- the animals they regarded as being at the summit of life. Using mammal paleontology as its central focus, the project examines how paleontological theories of development and reconstructions of fossil beasts led to new understandings of the environment and animal world. Taking in examples from Europe, North and South America, and colonial contexts, the project argues that nineteenth-century engagement with animals and the environment were preconditioned on ideas drawn from the deep-time sciences, which promoted a world-wide vision of nature and modern life as inscribed by a deep natural history.

 

 

Biography

Chris Manias is Senior Lecturer in the History of Science & Technology at King’s College London.  He is a specialist in the history of science in modern Europe and North America, with special interests in the history and wider cultural impacts of the human, evolutionary and deep-time sciences.  His first book, Race, Science and the Nation: Reconstructing the Ancient Past in Britain, France and Germany, 1800-1914, examined the transnational development of understandings of national origins in the nineteenth-century, and interchanges between anthropology, archaeology and comparative linguistics.  He is currently working on a book project entitled The Age of Mammals: Nature, Development and Palaeontology in the Long Nineteenth Century (forthcoming with University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023), which examines how the deep past of the mammals was reconstructed in the nineteenth century, and used to define the present of the natural world. 

 

Barbara Crosbie, ‘The Rising Generations: Age Relations and Cultural Change in Eighteenth-Century England’ (7 avril)

Jeudi 7 avril de 17h à 18h30 – Salle D040 à Serpente

De façon exceptionnelle, l’intervenante sera à distance. Lien de connexion disponible auprès de Stéphane Jettot jettot(at)yahoo.com

 

BARBARA CROSBIE (DURHAM), “The Rising Generations: Age Relations and Cultural Change in Eighteenth-Century England”

The eighteenth century is not generally associated with the formation of social generations, and yet contemporaries were clearly aware of their place within distinct generational cohorts. The interactions between these age groups were an important driver of cultural change as the experience of older adults inexorably gave way to the expectations of each rising generation. It is this process of intergenerational transition that is placed under the spotlight in this paper, with age providing both the subject of study and the framework for a discussion about the process of historical change.   

 

Attention is centred on the generational divisions that spilled into the political arena in Newcastle upon Tyne during the general election of 1774, as youthful demands for autonomy became conflated with political demands for reform. Seeking to understand how and why this age-based tension arose leads back to the nurseries and schoolrooms in which formative years were spent, and traverses the volatile terrain of adolescence, before arriving in the adult world of fashion and politics. This exposes the roots of the political faction that emerged as the mid-century children reached adulthood, making it possible to map the often circuitous links between child’s play and a contested election. But more than this, it provides an analytical structure that obliges us to recognise that people lived through not in the past. 

 

Hugh McLeod, “Le déclin de la chrétienté en Occident. Autour de la crise religieuse des années 1960” (31 mars)

Séminaire franco-britannique d’histoire
Jeudi 31 mars 2022, 17h-18h30
Maison de la recherche
28 rue Serpente, Paris 6e, salle D421

Hugh McLeod (Birmingham), autour de son livre Le déclin de la chrétienté en Occident. Autour de la crise religieuse des années 1960 (traduit par Elise Trogrlic, Labor et Fides, 2021)

Dans cet ouvrage élevé au rang de « classique » par l’English Historical Review, McLeod revisite la crise religieuse des années 1960 dans une perspective européenne et nord-américaine. Son usage des sources orales rend son travail très original et la perspective comparatiste qu’il adopte est assez rare pour être soulignée. Le texte a pour particularité de situer les questions religieuses dans un contexte véritablement international, contribuant ainsi à une histoire internationale de la spiritualité et de la sécularisation, autour de la notion de «déclin» de la chrétienté (revisitée), de la montée de la société de consommation dans les années 1960, de l’année 1968, et des questions de sexualité et de genre. L’ouvrage explore ainsi les interrogations de la décennie des « sixties » pour nous aider à mieux saisir les questions religieuses et spirituelles qui agitent nos sociétés contemporaines.

Traduit de l’anglais par Élise Trogrlic. Préface de Guillaume Cuchet et Géraldine Vaughan

Nigel Leask, ‘Globalizing the Highland Tour: Ossian, Earth History, and ‘Fingal’s Cave” (24 mars)

Jeudi 24 mars 2022, 17h-18h30
Maison de la recherche
28 rue Serpente, Paris 6e, salle D421


Nigel Leask (University of Glasgow)

Globalizing the Highland Tour: Ossian, Earth History, and ‘Fingal’s Cave’.

In this paper I reflect on themes connected with the 18th century Highland Tour, notably Ossianic enthusiasm, global networks, geology, and the dawn of the carbon age. I will discuss two illustrated travel accounts, both the work of naturalists and Ossian enthusiasts, that established ‘Fingal’s Cave’ as the ultimate destination of the romantic tour. The first is English naturalist Joseph Bank’s journal account of his ‘discovery’ of Staffa on the course of his voyage to Iceland in 1772, published in Thomas Pennant’s Voyage to the Hebrides (1774). The second is French vulcanologist Barthelemy Faujas de Saint-Fond’s Voyage en Angleterre, en Ecosse, et aux Iles Hebrides (1797) narrating his tour to Staffa a decade after Banks in 1784, and exploring some of the transformations wrought on his narrative by geological and political revolutions.

 

Nigel Leask occupe la Regius Chair of English Language and Literature à l’université de Glasgow.  Il travaille sur de nombreux thèmes comme la figure de Robert Burns, l’orientalisme romantique, les récits de voyage et l’empire ou encore la littérature anglo-indienne de la période romantique. On lui doit notamment Old Ways, New Roads, Travels in Scotland 1720-1832 (Birlinn, 2020), Philosophical Vagabonds: Pedestrianism, Politics, and Improvement on the Scottish Tour (University of South Carolina Press, 2019), Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late-18th Century Scotland (Oxford University Press, 2010), Curiosity and the aesthetics of travel writing, 1770-1840: from an antique land (Oxford University Press, 2002).


Contact: jean-francois.dunyach@sorbonne-universite.fr

Thomas Jones, “The Foreign Jews Protection Committee: refugee protection and relief in First World War Britain” (17 mars)

Jeudi 17 mars 2022 à 17h_ Thomas Jones (University of Buckingham) “The Foreign Jews Protection Committee: refugee protection and relief in First World War Britain”. 

The First World War was a watershed moment in the history of political and religious asylum in Britain. Though now mostly remembered for the welcome given to Belgian refugees in 1914, the war years saw the permanent end to the legal framework of asylum and prevailing public attitudes towards refugees that had been shaped by the Victorian notion of a universal ‘right of asylum’. Refugees’ rights were significantly curtailed, and many deemed to be of hostile national origin or political orientation were interned and deported, with postwar legislation permanently embedding the new restrictionist dispensation. 

This paper will explore these developments by examining the Foreign Jews Protection Committee, a refugee organization that transformed itself several times in response to the shifting political landscape of these years. Alternatively a mass campaigning body, a registered ‘war charity’, and a conduit facilitating the flow of information and relief funds between the British state and resident refugee populations, the remarkably adaptive FJPC illustrated the bewildering and decisive changes to British asylum wrought in these years.

Thomas C. Jones is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Buckingham. His work focuses on exile, transnationalism, and political thought in modern Europe. He was a founding member of the AsilEuropeXIX network and is currently writing a history of asylum in Britain for Harvard University Press.

Andrew Mackillop, ‘Making Britain? The London-Scots in the long 18th century, c.1690-c.1820’ (10 mars)

Séminaire franco-britannique d’histoire
Jeudi 10 mars 2022, 17h-18h30
Maison de la recherche
28 rue Serpente, Paris 6e, Attention : salle D040

Andrew Mackillop (University of Glasgow) : Making Britain? The London-Scots in the long 18th century, c.1690-c.1820

While early modern Scotland’s history of heavy out migration to Ireland, Western and Northern Europe, and increasingly Britain’s global empire is now a well understood phenomenon, the London dimension remains tellingly neglected.  This paper considers what a greater focus on burgeoning Scottish human mobility to the metropole of the British and Irish Isles tells us about the country’s trajectory within the British Union and Empire. The paper will reflect on why the topic has suffered such historiographic neglect, outline some of the key sociological features of the London-Scots, before considering questions of associational trends and identities.

Andrew Mackillop est Senior Lecturer in Scottish History à l’université de Glasgow, ses recherches portent sur l’intégration des Écossais dans l’ensemble britannique, particulièrement l’empire, au cours du long dix-huitième siècle. Il a notamment publié Human Capital and Empire: Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British imperialism in Asia, c.1690-c.1820, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2021.

Contact: jean-francois.dunyach@sorbonne-universite.fr

Matilda Greig, “Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808-1914” (27 jan.)

Jeudi 27 janvier à 17h : Matilda Greig (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelone), autour de son  livre, Dear Men Telling Tales: Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808-1914 (Oxford, 2021)

As Napoleon’s wars drew to a close in 1815, a series of ripples flowed out into the publishing world. Veterans of the different campaigns had begun releasing memoirs of their experiences, in greater numbers than ever before, and with the help of descendants, publishers and translators, the tide would continue until well into the twentieth century. In this discussion of my book, Dead Men Telling Tales: Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2021), I explore the impact these personal stories had upon the history and representation of this period. Taking the Peninsular War as my case study, I show how the ‘soldier’s tale’ evolved differently in Spain versus France and Britain, how national histories of the same war remained starkly opposing over time, and how veterans themselves played an active role in the publication of their work. I conclude by considering the ironic legacy these books and their lasting commercial success left for the First World War generation – a myth of war as a positive, exciting and masculine experience, where quick victory was possible and glory could be won.