Carolyn Eichner

Scholar, USA

Carolyn J. Eichner is Professor of History and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She specializes in modern France and the intersections of empire, gender, race, and political radicalism. A 2022- 2023 Fulbright Research Scholar in France (Paris), she has been a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Feminism’s Empire (Cornell University Press, 2022), The Paris Commune: A Brief History (Rutgers University Press, 2022), and Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune (Indiana University Press, 2004), which in its French edition, Franchir les barricades: Les femmes dans la Commune de Paris (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020), was a finalist for the 2021 Prix Augustin Thierry.

The name : Legitimacy, Identity, and Gendered citizenship in France and Empire

Names form sites of engagement between people and states, colony and metropole, autonomy and hegemony, custom and law, and tradition and modernity. Eichner’s project analyzes the political, social, and cultural evolution of this public representation of personal identity. Focusing on 19thcentury France and empire, it explores the rise of nominal control by the modern, imperializing state. It also investigates how individuals and groups navigated these regulations, and it lays out the ways categories of inclusion and exclusion were used to ensure the control and regulation of populations, naming emerging restrictions determined by gender, race, religion and class.