ORIAS Teacher Working Group: Napoleon
IES continued to engage its outreach to the broader educational community by supporting a high-school teacher working group participating in
Humanities West, a San Francisco-based organization which hosts thematic events combining expert lectures on history, art and literature with musical performance and panel discussions.
In April 2009 teachers and students from six Bay Area high schools gathered to examine legacies of the Napoleonic era, while attending two days of Humanities West presentations by leading scholars in a program titled
Napoleon: European Culture at the Crossroads. The lectures and performances explored history, politics, legal reforms, art, music, and literature during the rise and fall of the mesmerizing Corsican.
The program included presentations by historians Roger Hahn (UCB), Steven Englund (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and American University of Paris); art historians Michael Marrinan (Stanford) and Juan Cole (Michigan); legal historian Laurent Mayali (UCB); Tolstoy scholar Luba Golburt (UCB); and a performance of Beethoven’s
Eroica Variations by pianist Teresa Yu (San Francisco Conservatory of Music).
At a break-out lunch meeting, the teachers’ working group considered a lesson on Napoleonic portraiture prepared for them by UCB art history graduate student, Camille Matthieu. As Matthieu explained, portraiture “can be seen as a sort of selective history—a '‘greatest hits’ of a man’s life.” Napoleonic portraits are all the more interesting for this because they inherit the problem of representation endemic to the French Revolution: “How does one depict a man when he is more than a man but less than a king: a general, peacemaker, consul, and finally emperor?” The working group lesson and links to other resources can be found on-line
here.
Find out what IES has been up to! From outreach to California's high school students and teachers, to setting up a new EU Center of Excellence, IES's programs and events engage faculty, community members, grad & undergrad students, and diplomats in a rich, multilayered conversation about Europe's past and future. We support dialogue covering culture, politics, and economics, while providing a locus for European specialists and emerging experts to inform each other's thinking and research. Read more about our activities here with our latest editon of eNews.
Historian of France, Joan Wallach Scott, professor in the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, spoke on "The Politics of the Veil" while a guest of IES last month as part of our Islam, Gender and the West program (see below).
IIS Director Harry Kreisler welcomed her during a videotaped interview in which she traced her intellectual odyssey and recalled the impact of the women's movement on her research and teaching. Professor Scott also described the intellectual influences that led her, more than twenty years ago, to write the now classic article, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." Part of the discussion focuses on her recent book The Politics of the Veil, an analysis of the political, cultural, and social factors that led to the French ban on the wearing of the veil by Muslim young women in public schools.
Go to the Conversations with History section of YouTube to view this interview.
