Fall 2022

Visiting Fellows

Alessandro Capone, Centre d'Histoire de Sciences Po

Alessandro Capone’s book project analyses the French military occupation in the Papal States from the intervention against the revolutionary Roman Republic in 1849 to the annexation of Rome to the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. With the aim of restoring and protecting Papal sovereignty, the occupation resulted in a system of shared governance between the French and local authorities. The practices of the occupation adapted to the dynamics of political conflict in an era marked by the struggle between liberalism and counterrevolution, the development of new state and imperial projects, and nation-building wars which ultimately lead to the Italian unification. By focusing on the multiple relations between the French military, Papal government and local society, the book exemplifies the connected history of France and Italy in the age of Risorgimento and sheds light on the reshaping of French informal imperialism after 1848.

Greg Conti, Princeton University

Greg Conti’s research focuses on the history of modern political thought, especially in Britain and France. During his time at Remarque, he will be working on a book on the constitutional lawyer and political philosopher Albert Venn Dicey, as well as a project on John Stuart Mill's views on representative government and parliamentary reform.

Hugo Drochon, University of Nottingham

Hugo Drochon’s research focuses on the center versus extremes in politics, from the French Revolution until today. The project makes three claims: 1) the center/extremes opposition is the better way, instead of left/right, to understand change over time; 2) it is how we must read the history of the West from the age of revolutions onwards; 3) we need to marshal the theories of the ‘vital’ and ‘radical’ center to revivify centrism today.

Tae-Yeoun Keum, University of California, Santa Barbara

Tae-Yeoun Keum’s research concerns the symbolic dimensions of politics: to what extent can and should politics be shaped by figurative elements in our thinking—such as symbols, metaphors, and narratives—that are not immediately transparent to reason? Keum’s first book explored this question through the lens of Plato’s myths and their reception in modern political thought. Keum’s second book, provisionally titled "The Symbol and the Vortex: The Symbolic Politics of Blumenberg, Habermas, and Schmitt," reconstructs the political theory of Hans Blumenberg in dialogue with the work of his contemporaries. Going against the grain of dominant approaches in the philosophical mainstream, Blumenberg developed an account of the dynamic role that myths play in modern political life. His work, in turn, helps political theorists appreciate not only the significance of figurative and symbolic content in politics, but also our own capacity to rewrite their content.

Victoria Smolkin, Wesleyan University

Victoria Smolkin is currently working on two projects: "The Wall of Memory: Ukraine and the Impossibility of History," and "The World of Tomorrow: Communism, Cosmism, and the Fate of Utopia." "The Wall of Memory" explores the conceptual and methodological conundrums of history through a microhistory of a cemetery in Kyiv, Ukraine, that became a contested site of politics, ideology, and memory, and which remains both symbolically saturated and ideologically fraught to this day. The themes raised by this story lie at the intersection of some of the thorniest questions of Russian, Soviet, and Ukrainian history. "The Wall of Memory" is about the challenges of writing a history in and of Ukraine as Ukraine continues to elude our existing conceptual frameworks and narrative structures. "The World of Tomorrow" is a cultural history of Soviet cosmic utopianism as it intersected with the communist political project over the course of the long twentieth century. The project explores the intersection of ideas, state power, cultural production, social imaginaries, and everyday experiences, and analyzes the emergence, life, and fate of cosmic imaginaries in the place where they took their most material form: the Soviet Union. "The World of Tomorrow" is a story about the utopian world brought forth in 1917—a world that was still possible to imagine fifty years later, in 1967—and follows how it was lost over the course of the following decades, becoming a site of nostalgia and regret.

Alessandra Vigo, Padua University

Alessandro Vigo’s research aims to detect the actual experiences of African decolonization and its long-term memorial and narrative results in Republican Italy, using the repatriation of Italians from Africa as a lens. More specifically, it looks at Italians who returned from Tunisia and the former Italian colonies in the Horn of Africa and resettled in specific areas in the central-west countryside of the peninsula, from the mid-1950s up to the late 1970s. Through the use of archival and oral sources, this research intends to identify the social conflicts which emerged between natives' and repatriates’ communities. Vigo’s goal is to ascertain whether shared narratives about the Italian colonial past and African decolonization persist among those communities.

New York University Doctoral Fellows

Dustin Aaron, Institute of Fine Arts

Dustin Aaron’s dissertation seeks to understand the role of the visual in pre-modern settler colonization. Focused on the medieval German settlement of the Eastern Alpine Region, he demonstrates how images of wilderness facilitated a two-sided narrative of the German settlers’ “return” to the place of settlement and the erasure of native Slavic claims to land. These predominately structural images are unusual, and have been ignored by the field of art history for their uniqueness. By placing them at the intersection of theology and politics, they are shown to be crucial to the creation and proliferation of colonial ideology and provide valuable insight into pre-modern European notions of race and the environment.

Anne Schult, GSAS, Department of History

Anne Schult’s dissertation retells the twentieth-century history of refugees, which typically unfolds as a tale of increasing legal protection, from the viewpoint of statistics and demography. Drawing on archives in Germany, France, Switzerland, Britain, and the United States, Schult argues that international law and the social sciences developed as competing attempts to identify, classify, and control refugees in Europe. Even before lawyers, demographers set out to fill the gap of knowledge surrounding refugees and used cross-national data sets to outline a comprehensive, international category. Their surveys also offered predictions of future displacement and were directly involved in refugee policy as it was enacted. While highlighting quantification as a targeted management device, Schult’s investigation of refugee statistics also reveals several surprises: the colonial fantasies involved in resettling European refugees, the allure numerical control held for jurists, and, not least, the ideas the displaced themselves brought to the practice of human accounting.

Visiting ENS Fellows

Nicolas Boiffin, École Normale Supérieure
Charlotte Guichard, École Normale Supérieure
Clémence Fort, École Normale Supérieure
Marion Chénetier-Alev, École Normale Supérieure

STANDING FELLOW

Aristotle Tziampiris, University of Piraeus

STANDING FELLOW IN EUROPEAN AFFAIRS

Pedro Sánchez, Secretary General, Spanish Socialist Workers' Party