Château of Blérancourt / Sussex Centre for American Studies Advisory Board

Scholars meeting

Americans in Paris

The Academic Advisory Board will advise and contribute to exhibitions at the Musée Franco-Américain at Blérancourt as it's comprised of thirty-three United States and European collaborators involved in a very Franco-American topic : Americans in Paris. Its members explore why Paris drew Americans across the literary, arts, business, and political spheres from the 18th century through our contemporary moment. Outputs include a poetry reading and seminar series; lectures at the University of Sussex; and open-access publications on Stanford’s Arcade website.

A number of interdisciplinary concerns bring this network together. Paris’s status as a world metropole is so well documented as to be a cliché: whether in the terms of the “capital of the nineteenth century” (Walter Benjamin) or the capital of the modern “world republic of letters” (Pascale Casanova) or, more recently, “capital of the Black Atlantic” (Jeremy Braddock and Jonathan Eburne), Paris has been understood as a center of cultural and historical dominance, as well as of imperial power. Such emphases, while important in their own right, have tended to occlude the city’s role as a medium or conduit, and the ways in which the very myth of Paris-as-global-metropole has facilitated the city’s uses for extraterritorial power. “Americans in Paris” seeks to re-theorize the spatial dynamics of global power—cultural, military, ideological, economic—through the case study of the “Americans in Paris,” tracking the unprecedented growth of an American expatriate community in Paris from the 18th century to the present, and the concomitant emergence of Franco-American institutions, corporate ventures, and counterpublics.

This group includes :

Abigail Susik, University of Willamette

Abigail Lang - University Paris Diderot

Alan Govenar - Docarts

Brooke Blower - Boston University

Bertrand Van-Ruymbeke - University Paris 8 Vincennes

Chelsea Olsen - University of Sussex

Elisa Capdevila - Versailles University

Emily Burns - Auburn University

Francois Brunet - University Paris Diderot

Francois Furstenberg - John Hopkins University

Ernest Frithiof Freeberg - University of Tennessee