From student demonstrations in France to youth-led movements elsewhere in the world, growing unrest reflects mounting concerns about inequality, public services, and the future of younger generations. In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey is joined by sociologists Jean Beaman and Ida Susser to examine the connections between France's student ... Show More
Nov 6
The Phoenix Rises: On Restoring Notre Dame Cathedral with Philippe Villeneuve
Philippe Villeneuve has been chief architect of Notre Dame Cathedral since 2013. On the night of the shocking 2019 fire, he learned by phone that the building he had loved since boyhood, and modeled in miniature at just 16, was burning. In this conversation with host Ryan Shinkel ... Show More
57m 46s
Nov 1
Sacred Betrayal: How the French Catholic Church Broke Its Pledge to Protect Jews During the Holocaust (Harvard UP, 2026)
When German occupiers rolled into Paris in June 1940, they arrived wary of the French Catholic Church. In a country where more than 80 percent of citizens were Catholic, bishops held enormous moral sway. During the 1930s, many used their positions to forcefully condemn the rise o ... Show More
37m 11s
Oct 25
A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity with Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche (Cornell UP, 2026)
A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity (Cornell UP, 2026) focuses on the Protestant connection linking three intellectual giants of twentieth-century French thought. All three came from a Protestant background and thus shared a common marg ... Show More
1h 10m
Mar 2024
Michel Foucault & The Age of Consent
In this episode, I unpack the infamous 1977 letter signed by many French intellectuals including Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and others critiquing France's consent laws. If you want to support me, you can do that wit ... Show More
22m 15s
Mar 2021
Robert Launay, "Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder" (U of Chicago Press, 2018)
Take a look at a globe. Europe is there in big letters, and, to us, this hardly merits a passing thought. But Europe is a concept, a construct, an idea. So too is modernity. These categories have rich and contested histories. It is to their lineage that Robert Launay looks in Sav ... Show More
1h 3m