Welcome to this podcast!

My name is AC Sieffert, I teach at Binghamton University, in Binghamton, NY (SUNY system).

Welcome to my podcast, a place in which I discuss in parallel an object and a story about history!

This podcast came about as a way to talk about my favorite things: the representations of science in pop culture, and the ways in which race and gender are constructed in the long 19th century.

I am originally a historian who take a turn into literature and linguistics around the time I moved to the United States in 2007. I hold a BA and an MA in European history from Université de Strasbourg, a MA in Literature, Language and Linguistics from Syracuse University, and a PhD in French Studies from Brown University. 15 years ago, I started working on the construction of gender throughway of women-authored travel journals, particularly women who had traveled to the Maghreb and North America. All the authors I worked on were upper class women, and although you would expect these women to be very traditional, all were bucking what one would except to be the framework of femininity in the 19th century.

The history of these women, the history of travel, and the birth of mass tourism in France is essentially the history of a complex network that extends on both sides of the Channel and both sides of the Atlantic. It’s the story of how material culture, overconsumption, mass marketing, and capitalism, radically changed the notions of gender and race in the long 19th century, and how some Western European countries underwent massive changes that made them massive imperial behemoths.

I’m interested in all things travel studies, an umbrella term that encompasses different genres: adventure novels, non-fictional travel journals, scientific reports, administrative reports, films, and even leaflets and ads.

It’s an area that is particularly permeable to fads, trends, and structural changes in what it means to be a citizen of a country–it incites political discourse while avoiding it, transmits scientific discoveries, and travel journals are a genre that is inherently democratic and encompassing, because it’s not considered “canonical”.

In this blog, we will talk about subjects that are coursing through these travelers’ lives and notes, and we will do by using one or two objects. Every time, I will give a short history of that object, and relate it to a trend in European and American history in the 19th century. Frequently, this podcast will hop the pond and talk about US history, with the understanding that it’s through the longstanding relationship to its so-called oldest ally, France, that I examine the United States.

Links to the seasons are below, and on the page of each season, you will find links to the pod bean page, and references in the episode.

The podcast is also available on Apple podcast.

Season 1: Racialism and Eugenics in the Long 19th Century

Season 2 (Coming Soon)