What did it mean to live in urban environments in nineteenth-century France? What was it like, including for those on the margins of society, those whose bodies, abilities or economic status did not fit into the mass mould?
Join us via Zoom, Monday 7 February at 5h30pm (UK) for a discussion with our speakers Will Clement (Oxford) and Sun-Young Park (George Mason University). They will discuss their research on bodies and cities in 19th century France in a session chaired by Rob Priest (RHUL).
You can view the papers in advance below, and book your place for the seminar discussion via the IHR website: REGISTER HERE. We warmly welcome anyone wishing to join us, including graduate and post graduate students as well as independent researchers.
Will Clement (Oxford) – “I see amongst these people there is more misery than bad faith”: deception and inspection in the work of commissions des logements insalubres, c. 1850-70
Will Clement is a Departmental Lecturer in Modern British and European History at Brasenose College, Oxford. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2018. He has published articles on housing reform and a blasphemous bar crawl in nineteenth-century France. He is preparing his first monograph, titled: Insalubrious: housing, society, and the state in nineteenth-century France. He is interested in the social and cultural history of the French bureaucratic state as well as the relationship between religion and urban space. His next project will explore the built environment of the nineteenth-century “Culture Wars”.
Sun-Young Park (George Mason University) – Disability, Accessibility, and the Urban Experience in Nineteenth-Century Paris
Sun-Young Park is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. She is a scholar of 19th-century France who studies the intersections of architectural, urban, and medical history. She is the author of Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), and is currently working on a new book project titled “The Architecture of Disability in Modern France”. Sun-Young received a BA from Princeton University, and an MArch and PhD from Harvard University.
