Christy Pichichero

1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I would say that eighteenth-century studies pursued me until I couldn’t escape it! Eighteenth-century studies first snuck into my life by way of classical music and art history during my undergraduate years at Princeton. I was a budding classical vocalist and student of comparative literature, focused on nineteenth-century French and Italian poetry. These interests came together while I was learning the French art song repertoire, in particular Claude Debussy’s settings of Paul Verlaine’s fêtes galantes poems. A hopeless nerd, instead of socializing during the fall of my senior year I spent my time researching these songs and poems and discovered that the latter were inspired by paintings by Antoine Watteau dating to the early eighteenth-century. I was enchanted by Watteau’s ethereal aesthetics and sought to learn more about the historical phenomenon of the fêtes galantes: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century garden parties wherein French aristocrats (decked out in formal garb, of course) picnicked, lounged, conversed, played games, performed or took in music and theater, and romanced one another. I ended up writing my senior thesis on the fêtes galantes and these representations across different artistic media, political, emotional, and aesthetic regimes. But I did not consider myself a dix-huitièmiste and when I began my doctoral studies at Stanford, I was still very much focused on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studies in both literature and musical performance (opera and art song). It was not until I began taking requisite period courses on early modern literature and culture—first with Keith Baker and then with Sepp Gumbrecht, Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Dan Edelstein, and John Bender—that I began to feel an inevitable pull toward the eighteenth century. This pull was not so much one of pleasure, but of annoyance. How could the seductive and seemingly well-intentioned universalist thought of the period be so blind, exclusionary, and full of false promises? How could the era of abolitionism also be one in which scientific racism was founded and firmly anchored? And why did we talk so much about the Enlightenment as a pacifistic and cosmopolitan age instead of acknowledging constant dynastic wars on a newly global scale, wars that philosophes like Voltaire and Rousseau praised and condemned in equal measure? I was very, very annoyed and full of questions that I became increasingly desperate to answer. I couldn’t avoid the eighteenth century any longer. A dix-huitièmiste (or rather, an early modern scholar) and my first book, The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Cornell, 2017), were born!
2. What are you working on right now?
I have a few scholarly projects underway right now. I am writing an article in French on knowledge, power, and military social networks of the French Enlightenment. I am also co-editing a three-part volume for H-France, Race, Racism, and the Study of the French and Francophone World Today, with Emily Marker (Rutgers-Camden). The first issue on research came out in spring 2019 and the volumes on the profession and pedagogy are in process. This has been an exciting and thought-provoking project, especially since the word “race” was stricken from the French Constitution in July 2018 and since many scholars in France view the concept of race as an analytically illegitimate American import. I very much look forward to being on sabbatical in 2019-2020 so that I can make progress and prioritize work on two book-length projects. One involves métissage, racialization, and intersectionality in early modern Europe and the other is a longue durée history of military humanism. Many of my working hours (and also hours that I should not be working!) are also dedicated to service and administrative work. 2017-2018 was the year in which my book came out and I got tenure, so in 2018-2019 the avalanche of post-tenure administrative responsibilities has fallen upon me. Some of this I have taken on with enthusiasm and purpose, especially Ph.D. admissions and projects involving race and pedagogy, diversity, equity, inclusion, and wellbeing in the profession. As the university’s Faculty Fellow for Diversity, Inclusion, and Wellbeing and as the College Coordinator for Diversity and Global Education for Humanities and Social Sciences, I have been researching best practices across American academe over the past 20 years that have aimed to build the pipeline of underrepresented, underserved students and professors (including women and racialized minorities). This research has permitted us to form a vision of what types of initiatives and institutional structures have led to successful outcomes and why many other efforts have failed. Based on this research, we have formed a grand strategy for faculty recruitment and retention at the university level and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences is poised to be a leader in implementing this strategy. At the same time, I have been contributing similar work to the disciplines of eighteenth-century studies and French history. I organized a race and pedagogy workshop for the 2019 ASECS conference, a plenary roundtable on structural racism and a graduate student/early-career faculty workshop for the Western Society for French History, and I serve on several executive boards where I have been trying to enhance inclusiveness and increase awareness of inequities in the profession while empowering people to act against it. As one of few tenured African-American women in the profession, I believe that these efforts constitute some my most important lifework. For me, getting tenure has fulfilled its age-old function in academe: it has given me freedom to speak out, to take action, and in many ways, to be myself.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
Following in the footsteps of Sylvie Steinberg, Dominique Godineau, John Lynn, David A. Bell, and others, I was very keen to integrate women’s history as well as gender and sexuality into my work on the French military of the long eighteenth century. One colleague who read parts of The Military Enlightenment in manuscript form told me that the inclusion of women warriors and heroinism, as well as questions of race, were concerns of modern historians that I anachronistically imposed upon early modern French military history. Wrong. I think it is critical to continually question these types of assumptions about supposedly “male” institutions and “masculine” cultures since in many cases historians and literary scholars—as much or more than the historical actors themselves—have rendered women invisible. Otherwise, I am very much engaged in the methods and theoretical concepts that conjoin Critical Race Studies and Women and Gender Studies. I am particularly interested in intersectionality and the challenges of analyzing elastic hierarchies of identity elements that shift or are shifted according to circumstance, audience, and varying sense of agency.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why?
This is by far the most difficult question! There are many fantastic works that I’ve read recently that sparked my creative and analytical thinking. One that I found particularly interesting and elicited great discussions in my advanced undergraduate/graduate seminar “Race in French and Francophone Film” is Crystal Marie Fleming’s Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France (Temple University Press, 2017). Fleming is a sociologist who deploys perspectives from Critical Race Studies to connect France’s history of slavery and racial construction to current politics of commemoration, collective memory, and racial oppression. Against a “timeless” notion of French universalist colorblindness, she posits “racial temporality” as a way to historicize and therefore analyze representations of race. As I pursue my work on race in eighteenth-century Europe, I will continue to think about Fleming’s approaches and findings. This book reaffirms my conviction that reading outside of our chronological scope and discipline is not only fruitful, but at times imperative for pushing our own field forward. I will also add that I appreciate Fleming’s stance as a scholar-activist. She says as much in the introduction to her book: “Although Resurrecting Slavery is based on systematic empirical research, it is also unapologetically political” (11). I am excited to read her most recent book, which bridges into public intellectualism, How to Be Less Stupid About Race (Beacon Press, 2018).
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
We acknowledge each other.
We listen to each other.
We amplify one another’s voices.
We help each other bring our “whole selves” to work.
We give each other a break.
We counter micro-aggressions with micro-affirmations.
We address emotional labor and cultural taxation.
We open our scholarly and social circles to new people.
We do not replicate the wrongs done to us.
We recognize different types and goals of feminism.
We promote a diverse range of women’s experiences, writings, and contributions as historically significant and indispensible subjects of inquiry.
We plug into our collective power.
We call oppression, discrimination, and white supremacy by their names.
We make concrete gestures to support one another’s careers: we mentor, we accommodate family schedules and time for self-care, we champion career diversity, we read book proposals, we help place articles in peer-reviewed journals or mass media publications, we elect individuals for leadership positions, we nominate scholarly projects for funding and prizes, we back meritorious renewal and tenure cases, we raise money to support research and conference travel for graduate students, independent scholars, and women working in contingent academic positions, we advocate for better employment conditions for women, especially those in adjunct and lectureship positions.
We will not only make academe better for other women, we will make it better for all.

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