What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion Thomas Dodman, in conversation with David Bell and Emmanuelle Saada

From the late 17th through the late 19^th century, nostalgia denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it could sometimes be deadly. What Nostalgia Was unearths that history. Thomas Dodman traces the invention of nostalgia as a medical diagnosis in Basel, Switzerland, its spread through the European republic of letters and into Napoleon’s armies, its subsequent transformation from a medical term to a more expansive cultural concept, and its shift in meaning in the colonies, where Frenchmen worried about racial and cultural mixing came to view moderate homesickness as salutary.

Thomas Dodman is Assistant Professor in the Department of French at Columbia, David Bell is a Professor of History at Princeton, and Emmanuelle Saada is Professor of History and French at Columbia.

Event co-sponsored by the Maison Française and Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities. Featured in the New Books in the Arts & Sciences series.

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