Julian Bourg

Julian Bourg

Mellon Postdoctorate Fellow (2002-2004)

Current Positions

Associate Professor, Boston College 2010–

Affiliate, Center for European Studies, Harvard University 2010-

FIELDS OF INTEREST

Modern European intellectual and cultural history; modern French history; the 1960s; terror and political violence; French theory

Profile

Professor Bourg’s teaching interests include courses on nineteenth and twentieth century European intellectual history, intellectuals and politics, the history of terrorism, history and film, modernism and postmodernism, and biopower. His first book, From Revolution to Ethics, winner of the 2008 Morris D. Forkosch book prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas, examined the revival of the theme of ethics among French intellectuals in the wake of the student and worker revolts of May 1968. He has also translated and introduced a book by famed political philosopher Claude Lefort on the meaning of the collapse of communism. Professor Bourg is currently writing a book on the history of the relationship between terror and democracy since the eighteenth century. His continuing interests include French theory, especially the thought of Michel Foucault; the relationship between ethics and aesthetics; and twentieth-century French Catholic intellectuals. Professor Bourg serves on the editorial board of Modern Intellectual History and is the past recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

[button link=”http://www.bc.edu/schools/cas/history/people/faculty/alphabetical/bourg_julian.html” type=”type-1-3″ size=”small” ] Website [/button]        [button link=”https://mii.wustl.edu/files/2018/06/Bourg-Julian-060617-23umo7j.pdf” type=”type-1-3″ size=”small” ] Curriculum Vitae [/button]

selected Publications
  • “Writing on the Wall: 1968 as Event and Representation,” in Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein (2015)
  • “Principally Contradiction: The Flourishing of French Maoism,” in Mao’s Little Red Book, ed. Alexander C. Cook (2014)
  • “Tempered Nostalgia in Recent French Films on the ’68 Years,” in The Long 1968, ed. Ruud van Dijk et al. (2013)
  • “Blame It on Paris,” French Historical Studies (2012)
  • “The Moral History of 1968,” in May 68, ed. Julian Jackson (2011)
  • “On Terror as Human Sacrifice,” Humanity (2010)
  • From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (2007)
  • Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy, by Claude Lefort, tr. and intro. (2007)
  • “The Red Guards of Paris: French Student Maoism of the 1960s,” History of European Ideas (2005)
  • After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France, ed. and intro. (2004)
Education

Ph.D., History, University of California, Berkeley, December 2001

  • Dissertation: Forbidden to Forbid: Ethics in France, 1968–1981

M.A., Historical Studies, Graduate Theological Union & The Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, May 1996

  • Thesis: Extravagant Genuflections: Catholic Modernisms in Fin-de-siècle France

B.A., History, Brown University, May 1992