Professor Bertrand Taithe
Bertrand Olivier Taithe
Professor in Cultural History
Secretary of the editorial committee of the European Review of History/Revue européenne d'histoire
Bertrand.taithe@manchester.ac.uk
Ext: 53102
Room: W2.16
- Biographical information
- Current Research
- Supervision
- Publications
- Teaching
- Conferences Organised
- Forthcoming conferences
Biographical Information
Born in France (Montpellier) I studied in Montpellier and later at the Sorbonne with professor François Crouzet before moving to Manchester to obtain my PhD. I held my Wellcome postdoctoral fellowship in Manchester at the Centre for the History of Science Technology and Medicine and then moved across the Pennines to lecture in the history department of the University of Huddersfield. After many happy years in Huddersfield, I am now delighted to be back in the University of Manchester.
Having begun as a British historian of urban sociology and Henry Mayhew in particular, I moved on to study the history of medicine and sexuality during and immediately after my doctoral thesis. From 1993 onwards my work has become concerned with the themes of medicine and war, My view was that the social and cultural history of medicine and war proved to be a field in need of revision. My work has always used cultural history informed by anthropology, history of science, medicine and technology, philosophy and sociology. The questions that I wished to address were directly relevant to these disciplines and to an interdisciplinary approach to cultural history based on the 'linguistic turn' and the use of theory as appropriate. My first monograph, devoted to the history of Paris during the sieges, was consistent with my earlier work on urban representations and invited a reflection on the history of modernity and the city.
Through my interdisciplinary work as a teacher on courses on cultural history, as well as on Michel Foucault (with Ken Hirchkop, Terry Eagleton, and Graham Ward), I became aware of the potential that interdisciplinary work represented. We embarked on a collective venture on the Arcades Project work of Walter Benjamin, it having become clear to us that only an exegesis addressing history, psycho-analysis, surrealism and modernism could make sense of what remains one of the great intellectual masterpieces of the twentieth century. Our project represents the congruence of our research interests in a given moment in the history of ideas.
Current Research
While my work on the Franco-Prussian war and Commune is now coming to an end, one of its salient features, namely the history of humanitarianism (a subject that I explored in preliminary fashion in articles and some chapters of my book) has now led me to develop my new project on the history of humanitarianism in the French colonial sphere. I began this work some four years ago, and it is beginning to bear fruit in the form of programmatic articles exploring the early phases of French humanitarianism and the later phase (in the late twentieth century) of humanitarian medicine. This is explicitly a return to the field of the cultural history of medicine and war. This research directly relates to the newly established Research Centre in the Cultural History of War. It is a broad theme covering the nexus of humanitarianism and war over a long period of at least 130 years.
My current research dwells on the history of humanitarianism in relation to military medicine, in particular colonial medicine and missionary medicine, in particular Catholic missionary work in the French empire broadly defined. My particular areas of interest are: Algeria from 1860 until 1939; the Cameroon and in particular the work of Ad Lucem and Dr Aujoulat, the new forms of humanitarian medicine arising in the post-colonial context and for the later period Médecins Sans Frontières.
Supervision
I am very interested in supervising students working on either the history of the body, French cultural history or the history of 'social explorers' in France and Britain. Please contact me if you have any research plans.
I am currently supervising a number of students in these areas:
- 2001-2005 - Rebecca Gill on Humanitarianism in Britain 1870-1914 (AHRB funded)
- 2001- Peter Wadsworth on the recording industry and studios 1950s-1990.
- 2002- Sarah Britton 'The Wembley and Glasgow Exhibitions of the 1920s and 1930s' (AHRB funded)
- 2002- John Strachan 'The Colon Culture of French Algeria, 1870-1930'. (AHRB funded)
- 2003 Charlie Wildman 'The Spectacle of the City in Manchester and Liverpool, 1920-1940' co-supervised with Dr Max Jones (AHRB funded)
- 2003 Naomi Sweeney 'Representations of Masculine failure in British pedagogical writings 1945-1990' co-supervised with professor Patrick Joyce (ESRC funded)
- 2004 Catherine Feeley 'The Diffusion of the works of Freud and Marx' co-supervised with Dr Alderson
- 2004 Katherine Davies, 'Intellectuals in interwar Paris' (AHRC funded)
- 2005 James Mansell, 'Auditory culture in fin-de-siècle Paris' co-supervised with Dr Penny Gouk (AHRC funded)
- 2005 Lucie Matthew-Jones, Religious spaces in the Settlement movement (U. Manchester funded)
Publication related to postgraduate work
- with Roy Fisher (School of Education, Huddersfield), 'Developing University Teachers: an account of a scheme designed for postgraduate researchers on a lecturing career path', Teaching in Higher Education, Vol 3 (1998), 1:37-50.
Publications
Authored Books
The Essential Mayhew: Representing and Communicating the Poor, London , Rivers Oram, 1996; ISBN: 1-85489-046 8
Defeated Flesh: Welfare, Warfare and the Making of Modern France, Manchester University Press, 1999, ISBN:0-7190-5621-7 more on Defeated Flesh and table of contents
To order the book see Manchester University Press . To read recent reviews see, European Review of History, March 2001; Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, Vol 40, November 2000; History Teaching Review, 22 March 2000; Day by Day December 1999; Social History of Medicine, August 2001, New York Review of Books, 13 March 2003.
Citizenship and Wars: France in Turmoil 1870-1871, Routledge, 2001, ISBN: 0-415-23927-3 (hbk) and 0-415-23928-1(Pbk) To read recent reviews see Le Mouvement Social, March 2002, in H-France, 2002 and in Migration Studies 2004
Benjamin's Arcades : An unguided tour, Manchester University Press, 2005, co-authored with Peter Buse, Ken Hirschkop, Scott McCracken.
Co-edited books
Forthcoming: French Masculinities co-edited with Christopher Forth, Palgrave 2007.
Prophecy: the power of inspired language in history, 1300-2000, edited with Tim Thornton, Themes in History, Sutton Publishing, 1997, ISBN 07509-1331-2.
Table of Contents
War: identities in conflict, edited with Tim Thornton, Themes in History, Sutton Publishing, 1998, ISBN: 0-7509-1684-2
Table of contents
Propaganda: political rhetoric and systems of beliefs, edited with Tim Thornton, Sutton Publishing, 1999, ISBN: 0-7509-2028-9
Table of Contents
Articles
2006 'Algerian Orphans and Colonial Christianity in Algeria 1866-1939', French History, 2006 (September)
2006, 'Remembering Victory, commemorating defeat : The Centenary of Trafalgar, 1905' in Holger Hook ed., Commemorating Nelson, British Academy Occasional Papers.
2006-7, 'Religious Responses, humanitarianism and colonialism from the Algerian drought and famine to the French doctors' in Christof Mauch & Christian Pfister (eds), Natural Hazards: Responses and Strategies in Global Perspective' , German Historical Institute Series International Environmental History, first volume of the series, Rowman and Littlefield
2006 'Cold Calculations in the Faces of Horror' : Measuring the meanings of Compassion' in Fay Bound and Janet Brown eds, Medicine and Emotions, Palgrave.
2005 'Les politiques de la famine: Paris assiégé', Actes du colloque de Nogent-sur-Marne, Nogent sur Marne.
2005, 'L'immense hôpital : médecine militaire et civile, humanitaire et épidémiologie durant le siège de Paris (septembre 1870 -janvier 1871)' in P. Bourdelais & Olivier Faure (eds), La Diffusion des Pratiques de Santé, Belin, 2005.
2004, 'Reinventing (French) universalism: religion, humanitarianism and the 'French Doctors'', Modern and Contemporary France, 12 (2004) 2:147-58.
2004, 'Should the Third Republic Divide us Least?', French History, Vol 18,
2003 'Slow Revolutionary Deaths: Murder, Silence and Memory in the Early Third Republic', French History, Vol 17, 3:280-306.
2002, 'The unlit corners of an Arcadian dream: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project', Journal of Victorian Culture, Vol 7, 2: 234-40.
2001, 'Morality is not a Curable Disease: Readings in the History of Venereal Medicine', Social History of Medicine, August 2001, vol 14, 2: 337-350.
1999 'Consuming Desires: Prostitutes and Customers at the Margins of Crime and Perversion in France and Britain, c.1836-1885', in M.Arnott & C. Osborne (eds), Gender and Crime, UCL University Press, London, pp.151-172.
1999, 'Monuments aux Morts? Reading Nora's Realms of Memory and Samuel's Theatres of Memory', History of the Human Sciences, vol 12, 2:123-139.
1999, 'De la supériorité de l'Angleterre sur la France? Regards sur la France dans la crise de 1870 et naissance de l'humanitaire.' in K. de Queiros Mattoso (ed.), Mélanges en l'Honneur de François Crouzet, L'Harmattan, Paris, pp. 311-339, ISBN: 2-7384-8107-8
1999 'Rhetoric, Propaganda and Memory: Framing the Franco-Prussian War' in B.Taithe & T. Thornton (eds), Propaganda: Political Rhetoric and Identity, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, pp.203-23.
1999 (With Mark Jenner) 'The Historiographical Body' in John Pickstone & Roger Cooter (eds), History of Medicine in the Twentieth Century: Volume 2, The Body, Harwood Publishing, New York, 1999, pp. 187-200, ISBN: 90-5702-479-9.
1999 (With Tim Thornton) 'Propaganda: A Misnomer of Rhetoric and Persuasion?' in B. Taithe & T. Thornton (eds), Propaganda: Political Rhetoric and Identity 1300-2000, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 1999, pp. 1-24.
1999 'Reliving the Revolution: War and Political Identity During The Franco-Prussian War' in B. Taithe & T. Thornton (eds), War: Identities in Conflict, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 1998, pp.140-56.
1998 'The Rise and Fall of European Syphilization: The Debates on Human Experimentations and Vaccination of Syphilis, c. 1845-1870', in F. Eder, L. Hall & G. Hekma (eds), Sexual Cultures in Europe, 1700-1995, volume 2, Manchester University Press, pp.34-57.
1998 'The Red Cross Flag in the Franco-Prussian War: Civilians, Humanitarianism and War in the 'Modern' Age', in R.Cooter, S. Sturdy, & M. Harrison (eds), Medicine, War and Modernity, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, pp. 22-47, ISBN: 0-7509-1802-0
1998 (With Tim Thornton) 'Identifying War: Conflict and Self-Definition in Western Europe' in B. Taithe & T. Thornton (eds), War: Identities in Conflict, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, pp.1-18
1997 'Fathers and Working Men: The Working Class Response to the Contagious Diseases Acts', in Keith Laybourn (ed.), Social Conditions, Status and Community, Sutton Publishing, 1997, pp.184-203, ISBN : 0-7509-1280-2
1997 (With Tim Thornton) 'The Language of History: Past and Future in Prophecy' in B. Taithe & T. Thornton (eds), Prophecy: The Power of Inspired Language in History, 1300-2000, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, pp.1-14.
1994 'La question du genre: L'approche du masculin', European Review of History-Revue Européenne d'Histoire, Vol. 1 (2), 229-39
Collaborative research
- With Tim Thornton, 'The Language of History: Past and Future in Prophecy' in B. Taithe & T. Thornton (eds), Prophecy: The Power of Inspired Language in History, 1300-2000, Themes in History, Sutton Publishing, 1997, pp. 1-14. ISBN 07509-1331-2.
- With Tim Thornton, 'Identifying War: Conflict and Self Definition in Western Europe' in B. Taithe & T. Thornton (eds), War: Identities in Conflict, Themes in History, Sutton Publishing, 1998, pp. 1-18. ISBN: 0-7509-1684-2
- With Tim Thornton, 'Propaganda: A Misnomer of Rhetoric and Persuasion?' in B. Taithe & T. Thornton (eds), Propaganda: Political Rhetoric and Identity 1300-2000, Themes in History, Sutton Publishing, 1999, pp. 1-24, ISBN: 0-7509-2028-9.
- With Mark Jenner, 'The Historiographical Body' in John Pickstone & Roger Cooter (eds), Medicine in the Twentieth Century, HarwoodPublishing , New York, 2000, pp. 187-200, ISBN: 90-5702-479-9.
Review articles
'Morality is not a Curable Disease: probing into the history of VD, morality and prostitution', Social History of Medicine, August 2001, vol 14, 2: 337-350.
' Monuments aux Morts? Reading Nora's Realms of Memory and Samuel's Theatres of Memory', History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 12 (1999) 2:123-139.
Reviews
Social History of Medicine, The Times Higher Education Supplement, French History, European Review of History/Revue européenne d'histoire, History of the Human Sciences, Modern and Contemporary France etc.
Teaching
Click on one of the following to obtain more information, check your WebCT accounts too:
- Level 1: State Nation and Nationalism
- Level 2: European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Freud (with Maiken Umbach and Stuart Jones)
- Level 3: HI 3060 Democracy and Decadence: France 1850-1900.
- MA: HI 6080 The Humanitarian Subject: Humanity, Medicine, and the History of the Body in the Nineteenth Century
- MA: HI 4061 History and Postmodernism (With Professor Patrick Joyce)
Conferences organised
- With Tim Thornton The Power of Prophecy, 1300-1990 a day conference University of Huddersfield, 16 March 1996,.
- With Benedikt Stuchtey Memory and History, an international day conference, German Historical Institute, 28 September, 1996.
- With Tim Thornton War and Identity, 1300- 1990, day conference, University of Huddersfield, 12 April 1997.
- With Tim Thornton Propaganda: Political Rhetoric and Identity day conference, University of Huddersfield, 21 March 1998.
- With Tim Thornton Citizenship, day conference, University of Huddersfield, 15 May 1998.
- The Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Society for the Study of French History: Being French, MANCHESTER 2001 With Dr Alan James.
- Europe 1000-2000: One thousand years of Communitas, Universitas et Civitas, Budapest 2001. Co-organized with Dr L. Kontler of the CEU university and the editorial Committee of the European Review of History/Revue européenne d'histoire. 2001
- Rebecca Gill and Peter Gatrell, War, Culture and Humanity, University of Manchester, a major international conference organised with the support of the British Academy and Routledge-Taylor and Francis. 2004
