Description:

Please join us for the Global Lunchbox, a weekly conversation convened by the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies that features conversations with scholars in the social sciences and humanities working on a range of global issues about their current research.

Our guest this week is Sarah Maza, Jane Long Professor in the Arts and Sciences and Professor of History at Northwestern, who will talk about the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in France and broader questions related to the history of blackness in 19th-century France.

Sarah Maza specializes in the history of France from the 18th to the 20th century, with a focus on social, cultural and intellectual history. Most of her work concerns “the social imaginary,” the ways in which people in the past have understood, experienced and represented social identities, particularly class identities.

Her books include Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (1983), Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Pre-Revolutionary France (1993), which won the David Pinkney Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850 (2003), winner of the George Mosse Prize of the American Historical Association, and Violette Nozière: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris (2011), singled out as an “editor’s choice” by the New York Times Book Review, and Thinking About History (2017). She also co-edited the Blackwell Companion to Western Historical Thought (2002).