Western Civilizations

Joshua Cole (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is professor of history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. His research focuses on gender and the history of population sciences, colonial violence, and the politics of memory in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, Germany, and Algeria. His first book was The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). His most recent book,?Lethal Provocation:? The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria?(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019)?is a study of the worst episode of anti-Jewish violence on French territory in peacetime in the twentieth century, the August 1934 riots in Constantine, a city in French Algeria.? Carol Symes is Professor of history and Director of the program in Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she has won the top teaching award in the College of Liberal Arts and Science. Her main areas of study include medieval Europe, especially France and England, cultural history, history of information media and communication technologies, and history of theatre. Her first book was A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (2007). (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). She also founded?The Medieval?Globe,?the first academic journal to promote and model methods for studying the interconnectivity of the medieval world. Her forthcoming project,?Modern War and the Medieval Past,?explores the ways that?ideas, monuments, and landscapes associated with the Middle Ages were sentimentalized, targeted, destroyed, and revived before, during, and after the Great War.