Cycle de conférences en Anthropologie (CCA) - Stéphane GERSON : "My Grandmother's Vichy Policeman : Toward a Historical Ethnography of Family Stories, 1994-1942"

- Feb 18th, 4 to 6 p.m., Salle H. Janne - S.15.331 : Stéphane GERSON : "My Grandmother's Vichy Policeman : Toward a Historical Ethnography of Family Stories, 1994-1942"

TITLE : My Grandmother’s Vichy Policeman: Toward a Historical Ethnography of Family Stories, 1994-1942

Between 1942 and 1944, a Nice police inspector helped a family of Jewish refugees from Belgium. Years later, one of these refugees fashioned a war story -- an adventure -- that depicted this policeman as a ‘friend,’ but said little about his police work, his wife (who helped as well), other refugees, or the factors that led him to help some foreigners though not others. This was my grandmother’s story. I heard it growing up in Brussels, and videotaped it in 1994, as a graduate student. Decades later, I return to this story with historical questions. How do we turn family stories into historical objects, open to their multiple dimensions, including their politics? How do we both honor and resist their narrative frameworks, their silences and absences? How, beyond biological filiation but attuned to kinship, do we write strangers as well as relatives into existence? Closer to home, how do I reckon with the policeman who, within and beyond our family story, both obeyed and disobeyed orders in wartime Nice?

Stéphane Gerson is Professor of French, French Studies, and History at NYU, where he directed the Institute of French Studies for several years. His current research revolves around personal family history and modes of historical writing, especially as it pertains to the Second World War between Belgium and France. He recently edited an essay collection, Scholars and Their Kin: Historical Explorations, Literary Experiments (Chicago, 2025) and is writing a historical ethnography of a family story: Les gestes de notre guerre, 1994-1942 (La Découverte, forthcoming).

Best regards,

Stéphane

Latest publication: Scholars and Their Kin: Historical Explorations, Literary Experiments (Chicago, 2025).

Professor of French, French Studies, and History, NYU