H-France is a scholarly organization promoting the study of French and Francophone history and culture online. Since its origins in 1991, H-France has grown into a central source of scholarly information and publications related to French history, literature, art history, musicology, film studies, and philosophy. Publishing five open access journals and supporting a discussion list, a Scholars Registry, and a website, the H-France Editorial Team is composed of a large group of volunteers whose efforts are the heart and soul of its operations.
Gülru Çakmak Succeeds Patrick Bray as the New Chief Editor of H-France Salon
It is my great pleasure to inform you that the H-France Editorial Board has approved the nomination of Gülru Çakmak, Associate Professor in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to succeed Patrick Bray as the Chief Editor of H-France Salon. A specialist of 18th & 19th-century French, English, and Ottoman art, Prof. Çakmak is the author of Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s (Liverpool UP, 2017), which examines the period when traditional history painting lost its status as a compelling mode of representation. More recently, Prof. Çakmak is working on two new projects: Materiality, Process and Facture in English and French Sculpture at the End of the Nineteenth-Century and Osman Hamdi and the Long Duration of History. Since 2020, she has also served as Associate Editor of H-France Salon and, with Jennifer Heuer, edited the Salon special issue on “Rethinking Race & Representation in Art History & Material Culture of the 18th- and 19th-Century Francosphere.” (vol. 14, issue 8). Prof. Çakmak’s keen sensitivity to historical questions, interdisciplinary approach to visual culture, and interests in the ways French and francophone cultures intersect with other cultures and societies, make her well-suited to lead H-France Salon and build on the legacy of Prof. Bray’s editorship.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Patrick Bray for his outstanding leadership of H-France Salon since 2018. During this time, Prof. Bray has overseen the publication of 76 issues with 354 individual items, expanding the scope of the Salon‘s activities and cementing its place as the preeminent online multimedia journal of French studies. Under his guidance, the Salon has been at the forefront of H-France’s responses to recent events, helping to host conferences that were moved online due to the coronavirus pandemic (i.e. Rudé/SFHS 2020, SSFH 2021) as well as new online programs such as SFHS’s French Presse and Nineteenth-Century French Studies’ NCFS Unbound! series. A number of special issues on race and racism in the study of France and the Francophone world, meanwhile, have contributed to a critical reexamination of our fields, helping to foster important conversations about the present and the future. Prof. Bray has also been generous with advice and support as a member of the Editorial Board, and I have been grateful for his insights and comments.
On behalf of H-France, I would like to thank Patrick for everything he has done during these past several years, and to welcome Gülru as the new Chief Editor of H-France Salon.
Michael P. Breen, H-France Editor-in-Chief
H-France Discussion List Issues
Dear colleagues – I have heard from some members of the discussion list that they have not been receiving H-France emails. It appears that this is due to the fact that some institutions’ security settings are blocking emails from our server at the University of Akron. We hope this will be resolved soon. In the meantime, if you find that you are not receiving emails from the Discussion List, please let me know. My apologies for the inconvenience.
Update: We have been informed by the University of Akron that the pending upgrade that has been responsible for these issues should be completed by the first week of January 2023.
Further Update (Jan. 10, 2023):
The major upgrade implemented by the University of Akron seems to have had some unexpected consequences. Individualized settings (Digest, No Mail, etc) appear to have reverted to default. Thus, if you have started receiving individual messages instead of a daily digest, or suddenly started receiving messages again out of the blue, that is why. It also appears that some former subscribers may have started receiving messages once again. Akron is aware of these issues and is working to resolve them. H-France apologies to those who have been receiving unwanted emails. We are endeavoring to correct the situation as quickly as we can and ask for your patience while we work through these issues.
If you have attempted to unsubscribe using the instructions on the H-France website and have received an error message, please let me know by contacting me directly. Please do not send requests to unsubscribe by replying to a discussion list message or by sending a message to h-france@lists.uakron.edu, as these go into the moderation queue for the list and must be rejected by the moderator, which is both cumbersome for us to manage and results in the generation of an automatic message to the original sender that might be confusing in the current circumstances. If you write to me directly with your request, I can work with Akron to make sure that it is processed. Please do note that it may take a couple of days for your request to go through, but it will be handled as quickly as possible.
Akron’s IT staff has indicated that things might be bumpy for a bit, but we hope to have a much fuller ability to manage the list by early next week. At that point, people should be able to restore their individual preferences and manage their subscriptions with greater ease.
Once again, my apologies to everyone for the inconvenience. We hope to have regular (and even improved) service restored in the coming days.
Michael P. Breen, H-France Editor-in-Chief
♦Imaginaries: Films, Fictions, & Other Representations of the French Speaking Worlds♦
Dear H-France Members
Laura Mason and Corine Labridy are delighted to announce that the inaugural issue of Imaginaries: Films, Fictions, & Other Representations of the French Speaking Worlds is now available at https://h-france.net/imaginaries/.
This site continues and expands on Fiction and Film for Scholars of France, edited by Liana Vardi since 2012. The aim of Imaginaries is, like that of Fiction and Film, to engage past and present by publishing reviews of arts that speak about the world differently than do historians, critics, and journalists. The site will expand on its predecessor’s geographic breadth by still more comprehensively addressing creative expression from all parts of the world with which France has interacted, which we understand to be equal partners in the complex project of representing past(s) and present(s). At the same time, Imaginaries broadens the generic reach of Fiction and Film by taking on new media, like games and podcasts, and other kinds of more traditional media, such as museum exhibitions and plays. While we still hope to serve readers looking for fictions they might use in the classroom, we aspire as well to suggest how more imaginary depictions are, quite simply, “good to think with.” How do novels, films, plays, video games, and other sorts of representations enhance our engagement with the complex world before us?
The first issue looks backward and forward by continuing a project begun by FFSF last year: that of considering how pandemics past speak to the crises of COVID, with essays by Charles Forsdick on J.M.G. LeClezio’s La Quarantaine; Richard Keller on Fred Vargas’ Pars vite et reviens tard/ Have Mercy on Us All; Pascal Gagné on shifting cinematic representations of AIDS and intimacy since 1992; and Daniel Maroun on the new English translation of Hervé Guibert’s autobiographical fiction, To the Friend Who Didn’t Save My Life.
Michael P. Breen, H-France Editor-in-Chief
♦H-France Research Repository♦
Dear H-France Members:
I am thrilled to launch publicly today the H-France Research Repository. The Research Repository holds copies of digital photographs taken by scholars at libraries and archives and information on microfilm reels in H-France’s possession to be lent out for research. These resources are made available due to the generosity of the scholars who took the photos and commissioned the microfilms from national, departmental, and municipal archives. The Research Repository may be accessed at https://h-france.net/h-france-research-repository/.
We wish to express our great admiration to the thousands of archivists and librarians whose work is central to researchers. The materials made available here can never replace archival research or the joys of discovery working though books and boxes, but we do hope that it can aid and sustain those researchers unable to travel to such institutions.
As the Research Repository is designed for use by scholars and their students, the materials are organized by their archival codes. When possible, we have also included links to online indices for specific archival series. Archival materials for which an entire folio or box was photographed or microfilmed in its entirety are listed as “complet.” Archival materials for which only selected pages or items material were photographed or microfilmed are listed as “en partie.”
These materials are made available without charge and in terms of the laws governing and set by the institutions holding the original documents. We have been in contact with the Service interministériel des Archives de France as well as with individual archives to ensure that these materials may be offered through this repository. We have endeavored to exclude from the Research Repository material which is not publicly available under the laws and policies governing such material or which require special permission for consultation (such as a dérogation). If material is found in the Research Repository which should not be included, we will quickly remove the material once informed. Please contact the Research Repository Editor David Kammerling Smith at dksmith@eiu.edu.
We very much wish to continue to add to the Research Repository. In fact, we have more material which we will be adding in the coming days and weeks. We would very much welcome additional donations of photographs and microfilms. If you have material to donate, please contact the Research Repository Directory at the email address above. The richer the repository, the more useful it will be for researchers and for students. There are presently several tens of thousands of photos available. We would love for that to become hundreds of thousands.
Finally, a particular thanks to Claire Lemercier for her assistance and advice in developing the project. Her contacts and knowledge of the laws affecting archival material have been invaluable. And further thanks to Billy Davis and Sergio Vlahovich, who undertook much of the work building and developing the website.
David Kammerling Smith
H-France Editor-in-Chief and Research Repository Editor