The History Department was honored to host distinguished French historian Christy Pichichero as the visiting Verne Moore Lecturer for Fall 2022. Professor Pichichero is Associate Professor of French and History at George Mason University, where she also serves as the Director of Faculty Diversity in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and she is the author of The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Cornell University Press, 2017).
She is also the immediate past president of the Western Society for French History, a current External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, and a public intellectual whose critiques of the international phenomenon that she has identified as discriminatory gaslighting you can find through National Public Radio, NBC News, and Forbes Magazine, and whose commentaries on French and American politics you can read through The Hill, Authority Magazine, and the independent French digital newspaper Médiapart.
Professor Pichichero came to Rochester for two days and led three events that attracted faculty, students, and staff from across the University. She began her stay by leading a lunch workshop on Tuesday, 13 September, where participants discussed ways to combat the challenges of imposter syndrome and discriminatory gaslighting in the contemporary academy by building and maintaining at least three different kinds of supportive networks: a network of family and/or friends, a network of peers in our current field(s) at our current professional level, and a network of mentors who have already succeeded in the fields and levels where we hope also to succeed ourselves.
Advisors and mentors can help students identify where their networks are strong and where they may want to fill in the blanks with additional individuals who may be able to support them, and we can also inventory our own existing networks to see where we may want to seek additional advice and support ourselves.
Professor Pichichero’s Verne Moore Lecture, which she presented on the evening of Tuesday, 13 September, presented her current work in progress on the topic “Black | Power: Modalities of Resistance in the Early Modern Afro-French Diaspora.” Professor Pichichero dedicated her talk to the memory of the late Paul Burgett (1946-2018), the beloved teacher, mentor, scholar, and academic administrator who helped to make so many students and colleagues feel at home at the University of Rochester over the course of his remarkable fifty-four-year career here.
Her talk itself focused on the critical importance of producing new kinds of early modern history that include histories of the African diaspora around the world, histories of Africans’ experiences in Europe, and histories of Black lives. Sharing insights from the archival work that she has conducted for her current book project, "Song of Saint-George: Racism, Resistance, and African Diasporic Lives in the Age of Revolutions (1750-1850)," she introduced us to the life and work of the influential eighteenth-century violinist, fencer, and composer Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-George, as a way of highlighting the contours of Black power, unearthing strategies of emancipation, and celebrating resistance to racism across the French empire.
Professor Pichichero’s talk inspired a lively discussion about a wide range of additional topics of pressing contemporary concern in the United States, France, Germany, and elsewhere. Each of these countries has had a different history of racism and anti-racism, each of these countries approaches current conflicts over race and other forms of identity in a range of different ways, and there is an important ongoing national and international debate over which of these ways will be best. Professor Pichichero generously continued the conversation about these and other topics not only at the reception following her talk, but also at a special lunch with students on Wednesday, 14 September.
We are grateful to Professor Pichichero for spending so much time with us, and we look forward to reading her new work in early modern French and Francophone studies with eager attention.
Jean Elisabeth Pedersen
Professor of History