This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research?

Introducing a podcast: Welcome to Archival Fever![1] In each episode, your intrepid hosts take you into the archive in search of the wild, crazy, and bizarre … We’re becoming doctors in literature, Ph.D.s to be precise. That means we have research expertise in knowing how stories work and also about who gets to write them. It’s really about what stories mean for humanity and culture: telling you stories about what being human really means.

Being human is about relationships. While the humanities is about being human, humanities research can be isolating in the best of times. While classrooms typically offer consistent spaces to gather, the types of scholarship currently prized are attributed to a single author. Although projects like dissertations or book manuscripts necessitate committee feedback or peer review, mentions of such labor are typically relegated to an acknowledgement section. Scholars are often deterred from collaborative, public-facing, and/or interdisciplinary work by rigid constraints of dissertations or tenure.

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Killer wallpaper. A childhood comic strip. A 10-foot portrait made of hair combs. Secret Oval Office Dictabelt recordings. These objects share one thing in common — they’re preserved in archives. Our podcast “Archival Fever” narrates the life stories of artifacts. We dive into the possibilities and problems of how we save history.

Archivists at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University face this kind of fascinating problem. Within their stacks, they have two copies of Dr. Robert Kedzie’s Shadows from the Walls of Death (1874), a book of 19th-century arsenic- laced wallpaper. It literally can make a person feverish! Kedzie intended to raise awareness about the dangers of arsenic by sending 100 copies to libraries around Michigan. Today, handling the book requires protective gear.

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The great achievement of Mastering the Art of French Cooking is the creation of a community of readers in the United States. Such an achievement was premised on Child’s (and her co-authors’) under- standing of the changes in American domestic service from the 1920s to the 1960s, whereby cooking became the responsibility of a housewife who also functioned as maid and hostess. These housewives were the “new” con- sumers of cookbooks and Child’s cookbook presented cooking as a fulfilling and cultured activity.

Read more in Consumption and the Literary Cookbook. Routledge’s Popular Culture Series. 2020

In the preface to Les Belles lettres (1961), Charlotte Delbo argues that l’art épistolaire reclaims significance through contemporary political events. Letter writing becomes a mode of indignation previously expressed through political parties, protests, and collective action at the turn of the twentieth century. In Les Belles lettres, Delbo curates a selection of letters featuring testimony about the Algerian War, selected primarily from Le Monde, but also from political journals such as Les Temps modernes and Vérité-Liberté. Interspersing biting commentary, Delbo condemns French imperialism in Algeria and critiques comparisons to the Holocaust, Vichy France, and Nazi Germany. She democratizes the epistolary genre to amplify voices and testimonies that are often silenced or censored because of race, gender identity, political affiliation, religion, and socio-economic status. Delbo’s subversion of belles lettres is an act of civil disobedience. Letter-writing disrupts the political discourse by channeling le bruit des femmes.

Continue reading in Women in French

Transitioning to online courses mid-semester poses some logistical and pedagogical challenges, especially for humanists who value seminar-style classrooms. Adapting to a virtual course does not mean you have to radically revise your learning objectives or course materials. Rather, it is an opportunity to check-in and ensure your course is centering on students and their learning experience.

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The omelette lulls the novice cook into complacency. While it only requires a few ingredients, it demands skill, confidence, and timing to pull off with panache. One eggshell in the mix, an overly heated pan, or the unsuccessful flip, and the entire effort falls flat. Cooked to perfection, it represents the quintessence of modern French cuisine. It draws together fresh ingredients, developed for flavor. Simplicity and balance marry creamy texture and delicate, fluffy eggs.

Ever curious archivists, we wondered where the omelette made an early impression. We’ll be honest; we were a little hungry that brainstorming day. While this seemingly humble dish has become a brunch and Tuesday evening staple in our repertoires, the hunt was on to find its initial publication in a historic cookbook. A bit of determined searching later, we found a likely early contender.

In his 1651 cookbook Le Cuisinier François  (hereafter LCF), François Pierre de la Varenne helped transition France away from an Italian-style of cooking requiring expensive imported spices into its modern form. La Varenne was not solely responsible for altering the state of cooking, but he was the first to put these innovations in writing.

Continue reading Part 1 and Part 2 on the Recipes Project

During her annual trip to France with students in the Normandy Scholars program in 2008, Judith Coffin, an associate professor of history at The University of Texas at Austin, visited the manuscripts collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) in search of letters.

While conducting research for a project, she had come across a footnote that mentioned letters written to Simone de Beauvoir. The letters were in Beauvoir’s archive — a collection of letters, manuscripts and other personal documents — at the BNF. However, no record of the letters existed in the finding aids. When Coffin reached out to the supervising curator to inquire about the letters, she had no idea they would occupy the next decade of her life.

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