Herrick Chapman's Teaching and Research InterestsResearch Interests:
As a European historian specializing in modern France, I have pursued research principally on the relationship between the economic change and the transformation of political culture amid the upheavals of the two world wars, the Great Depression, and the struggle over decolonization during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. My first book, on the French aircraft industry in the 1930s and 1940s, examined the internal social dynamics of a politically turbulent industry during the Popular Front, the war and occupation, and the challenges of postwar recovery during the early Cold War. I am now writing a book on the social and economic reconstruction of France after the Second World War with a focus on why elites and a variety of social groups came to regard state authority in new ways during the Fourth Republic. This project develops comparisons across several areas of public policy--industrial renewal, family policy, social security, immigration, and the regulation of the retail trade--where state intervention took new forms and provoked important debate. As part of this project I have published essays on the history of the French welfare state, on national identity and the postwar modernization of France, and on the Liberation of 1944 as a moment in state making. I also have an abiding interest in comparative history and in work that examines France in a broader European and trans-Atlantic context. In addition to an essay comparing steel towns in the U.S. and Europe, I have co-authored a textbook that stresses inter-regional comparisons in Europe and co-edited a book on democratization in four continents. The book I recently edited with Laura Frader on “Race in France” draws to some extent on comparisons between France and the United States. I also serve as the Editor of French Politics, Culture & Society, an interdisciplinary journal sponsored by NYU’s Institute of French Studies and Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European History.
Teaching Interests:
As a faculty member in both the History Department and the Institute of French Studies, I teach courses on the history of France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I also offer a course cross-listed with the Stern School of Business on the history and current dynamics of the French economy. To give undergraduate history majors a chance to work intensively with primary sources, I teach a workshop on France and Germany during and shortly after the Second World War. In all my courses I strive to integrate social, economic, political, and cultural history, and I pursue the study of France within a broad international framework defined especially by the relationship of France to Europe, the United States, and the French colonial empire.
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