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a public event

Rethinking Eugen Weber's "Peasants Into Frenchmen": Acculturation, Integration and Difference in Modern Europe

Rethinking Eugen Weber's "Peasants Into Frenchmen": Acculturation, Integration and Difference in Modern Europe

One-day conference in 306 Royce Hall

Monday, December 04, 2006
9:00 AM - 6:00 PM
306 Royce Hall
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095

This one-day interdisciplinary conference focuses on the impact of Eugen Weber’s pathbreaking book, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, which was first published thirty years ago and which has just been reissued in France, on a generation of scholars who have explored the problems of difference and national integration in colonial and postcolonial Europe. It brings together historians, an anthropologist, and a literary scholar to discuss this much debated book’s influence on their own work, on their fields, and on present and future directions in the study of acculturation and difference in modern Europe. -- 9:30 Introductory Remarks -- 10:00 John Merriman (Yale University):“Peasants Into Frenchmen Revisited” -- 10:45 Stephane Gerson (New York University):“’A World of Their Own: Searching for Popular Culture in the French Countryside” -- 11:30 Laird Boswell (University of Wisconsin, Madison): “Rethinking the Nation at the Periphery” -- 12:15-2:00 Lunch Break -- 2:00 Sara Melzer (UCLA): “ From Native American ‘Savages’ Into Civilized French Catholics: The Foundation of France’s Assimilation Policy in the 17th Century” -- 2:45 Gilles Pecout (Ecole Normale Supérieure): “The Role of the State in the Modernization of the Countryside: France and Italy in the 19th Century” -- 3:30 Katherine Verdery (City University of New York Graduate Center): “Peasants Into Poles, Peasants Into Lumpen: Can Weber Travel East?” -- 4:15 Roundtable Discussion, Caroline Ford (UCLA)

Cost: free

For more information please contact

Jim Robbins
Tel: (310) 825-4060
jrobbins @ international.ucla.edu

Sponsor(s): Center for European and Eurasian Studies, Department of History, French and Francophone Studies, Centre Pluridisciplinaire/Center for the Study of Global France, Eugen Weber Chair in European History