Mapping a Life: A Scholar's Unlikely Journey

In Mapping A Life: A Scholar’s Unlikely Journey, Dr. Sally Charnow offers her intellectual autobiography – the unforeseen twists and turns, the chance encounters, the closed doors, and hard-won opportunities. She charts her unlikely journey from modern dancer, choreographer, and arts activist to a historian of France, French Jewry, and France’s post-colonial legacy; from arts administrator to chair of the department of history at Hofstra University and the immediate past co-president of the Society for French Historical Studies. Beyond discussing her scholarly work, Dr. Charnow will help us think about the very nonlinear pathways we forge as we walk through our lives.

Sally Charnow is a Professor of Modern European and Postcolonial History, and Women and Gender Studies at Hofstra University. She brings together her interdisciplinary training in Performance Studies and History in her research and writing on issues related to cultural production, art and politics, and minority subcultures in modern France and beyond. She is the author of Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France (Routledge, 2021); Theatre, Politics and Markets in Fin-de-Siècle Paris: Staging Modernity (Palgrave, 2005); and the editor of Artistic Expressions and the Great War, A Hundred Years On (Peter Lang, 2020). Her articles and reviews have appeared in Revising Dreyfus: Art and Law (2013), Radical History Review, American Historical Review, French History, Modern and Contemporary France, and H-France. Her current book project, Walking Marseille: At the Crossroads, then and now focuses on Marseille’s local, pluralist, multicultural, and transnational character. It is meant to offer the reader a sense of delight as well as an exploration of the often-tough facts of urban growth, deindustrialization, and gentrification.