Herrick Chapman is Professor Emeritus of History and French Studies at New York University. As a modern European historian, he writes and teaches principally on the social, economic, and political history of France and the French empire since the eighteenth century. Much of his work focuses on the uses of state authority in French society, and from that optic he has written on labor relations and business enterprise, gender and the welfare state, shopkeepers and anti-tax rebellions, and racism and discrimination, among other subjects. His latest book, France’s Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic (Harvard University Press, 2018, French translation, Presses de Sciences Po, 2021), explores how the French rebuilt their economy and polity after World War II. For twenty years Chapman also served as the editor of French Politics, Culture & Society, an international journal that NYU and Harvard have jointly sponsored since 1999. He is now embarked on a new book project with his wife, the American historian Lizabeth Cohen, that compares the experiences and aftermaths of deindustrialization in the United States and France. He has traveled widely in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and in several countries once part of the former French empire. Chapman has degrees from Princeton University (an A.B. and M.P.A. in public and international affairs) and the University of California at Berkeley (an M.A. and Ph.D. in history).
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