Department of History | The University of Chicago

Field Specialties
19th and 20th century European Social and Cultural History with a focus on France and Germany; Material Culture and the Built Environment; Culture and Politics; Jewish History; Gender History and Theory; Colonial and Post-colonial Europe.

Biography
The primary national focus of my research is modern France, but I have found myself intrigued by research problems best treated transnationally. My most recent book, Cultural Revolutions, moves across the Atlantic world from Britain, to colonial and early national America, and finally eastwards again to France. My ongoing pair of projects, Strangers at Home and Conundrums of Commemoration, stay on the European continent but involve a comparative analysis of Paris and Berlin in the twentieth century. Finally, although I have not yet published extensively in this area, I maintain an active interest in, and regularly teach, the history of European colonialism and the post-colonial world it left behind.

Conceptually, my work focuses on the intersection of material culture, everyday life and politics. I seek to explain how and why everyday things have become catalysts for conflict, means of expressing identities and constructing selves, vehicles for dissenting opinions, and sites of unexpected state intervention. My research agenda is based on the hypothesis, informed by phenomenology and feminist theory, that key to answering these questions is the close and careful study of material culture, but a close and careful study that always links the concreteness of everyday goods to the abstractions of polity, society, and economy.

Although the courses I offer are necessarily broader and more general than this research agenda, they have been systematically informed by it. I use material and well as visual and textual sources in virtually all my classes, and nearly all are transnational in reach.

Publications
My publications in the domain of material culture and the histories of production and consumption include two books: Cultural Revolutions: (Oxford: Berg Press, 2008; Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2009); French translation: Presses Universitaires de Mirail, 2009) and Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996). I am also currently working on two book-length projects in this area: The Everyday of Modern Citizenship: France and Germany 1918-1940 and Conundrums of Commemoration.

My articles on material cultural and politics include: "Perceptions of Beauty and the Problem of Consciousness," in Lenard Berlanstein, ed. Rethinking Labor History (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993); "After the Revolution: Recycling Ancien Régime Style in the Nineteenth Century," in Bryant T. Ragan and Elizabeth Williams, eds. Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary France, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 144-174; "The Gendering of Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-Century France," in Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds. Sex of Things: Essays on Gender and Consumption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 79-112; “Regeneration through the Everyday? Furniture in Revolutionary Paris,” in a special issue of Art History (vol. 28:1, Spring 2005), ed. Katie Scott, and; “Beyond Words,” American Historical Review October, 2005; “Historians and Architectural History,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians March, 2006.

My work on material culture, post-colonialism, and everyday politics in contemporary Europe includes three essays: "'Sambo' in Paris: Race and Racism in the Iconography of the Everyday," (co-authored with Tom Holt) in Susan Peabody and Tyler Stovall, eds. The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, (Raleigh, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); "Bavarian Crucifixes and French Headscarves: Religious Practices and the Postmodern European State," Cultural Dynamics 12/3 (2000): 183-209 and "Accomodation, Resistance, and Eigensinn: Evolués and Sapeurs between Africa and Europe," in Belinda Davis, Michael Wildt, eds. Alltag, Erfahurng, Eigensinn: Historisch-Anthropologische Erkundungen (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2008), pp. 205-217.

My most recent area of research is at the intersection of Jewish history and material culture. Some early thoughts on those questions may be found in: "'Jewish Taste'? Jews, and the aesthetics of everyday life in Paris and Berlin, 1933-1942," in Rudy Koshar, ed. Histories of Leisure (Oxford: Berg Press, 2002), pp. 299-318. That reflection has taken a somewhat different turns in: “Resisting Context: The Spiritual Objects of Tobi Kahn,” in Objects of the Spirit: Ritual and the Art of Tobi Kahn, ed. Emily Bilski (New York: Avoda/Hudson Hills, 2004) pp. 71-78 and “Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris,” Journal of Contemporary History 40/2 (2005): 237-259; “The Boundaries of Jewishness or when is a Cultural Practice Jewish?” Jewish Social Studies, Spring 2009. Finally, “Archiving a Life: Post-Shoah Paradoxes of Memory Legacies,” for a volume edited by Alf Lüdtke and Sebastien Jobs, submitted September 2008 is my most recent venture in this area.

My work in the field of feminist history and gender studies includes: Différence des sexes et protection sociale (XIXe-XXe siecles), a co-edited volume with Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1995); "Feminist Theory and Social History: Explorations in the Politics of Identity," Radical History Review 53 (Fall 1992): 158-176; "Do Women's + Feminist + Men's + Lesbian and Gay + Queer Studies = Gender Studies?" differences 9/3 (Fall 1997):1-30; Le genre de la nation. Fall, 2000 issue of Clio: Histoire, femmes et sociétés on gender, citizenship and the nation, co-edited (with Michelle Zancarini-Fournel); "Women's Suffrage, Citizenship Law and National Identity: Gendering the Nation-State in France and Germany,1871-1918,” in Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes and Marilyn Lake, eds. Women's Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives (London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 138-152 and, “Gender at the Intersection of the Disciplines,” Cahiers Parisiens/Parisian Notebooks, vol. 2 (2006) pp. 434-446.

Teaching
Among the undergraduate courses I have taught in the last five years are:
Problems in Gender Studies
Europe 1930 to the present
Colonizations Civ, III
Jewish Civ, III
Modern Jewish History
Cultural Revolutions

Among the graduate courses:
Seminar: Religion, Politics and Society in Modern Europe (with John Boyer)
Everyday Life in Modern Europe (with Sheila Fitzpatrick)
Seminar: The Politics of Memory in France and Germany (with Michael Geyer)
Gender in Europe (with Susan Gal)
Seminar: Race, Racism and and Anti-Racist Movements in Modern Europe

Recent fields for general examinations include:
Modern European History
Modern French History
Gender History and Theory
Culture and Politics in Modern Europe
European Social History

Titles of some recent (or current) B.A., M.A. and Phd .theses:
Islam and the Republic: A study of the effects of the Algerian Civil War on French understandings of Islam
Female Action and the Closing of the Women’s Clubs during the Reign of Terror
War Relic: Revisiting the Leaning Virgin of Albert
Working Class Milieus under Attack: Struggles between the Left and Right in Leipzig and Lyon, 1929-1936 (co-chair with Michael Geyer)
The Evolution of French Abolitionism and the Memories of the French and Haitian Revolutions, 1815-1848
The Ground Beneath their Feet: Agricultural Industrialisation and the Remapping of Rural France, 1954-1976
Making Islam French Unsettling French Algeria: Settlement, Terror, and Violence in the French-Algerian War (1954–1962).
The Permanent Souvenir: Tattoos and Travel from Banks to Barnum Cultivating the Nation, Refining Empire: Wine, Sugar, and Nation-building in Guadeloupe and the Aude, 1880-1910
The Imperialism of Un-Free Trade: Nineteenth Century British Wine-Trading Enclaves in Oporto, Madeira, and Andalusia
Writing Black, Talking Back: Consuming, Performing, and Selling Race in Postwar France, 1945-1968
From Children to Citizens: Republican and Catholic Primary Education in France, 1880-1914
Fashioning the Folk: The Production and Reproduction of Alsatian Traditional Dress, 1871-1939
The Rebirth of the Mediterranean: Migrants, Race, Nation, and Labor in the Western Mediterranean, 1914-1940
Pale Fire: Jews in Revolutionary White Russia, 1917-1929 (co-chair with Sheila Fitzpatrick)
Selling Paris: The Real Estate Market and Commercial Culture in the Nineteenth-century Capital

Please see my personal website for more detailed information and links.

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Leora Auslander

Professor of European Social History
Founding Director of the Center for Gender Studies
Professor, Committee on Jewish Studies
Ph.D. Brown 1988