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In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995)

Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction. In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Even facing intense attacks, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic hold real public power. The power of scholars emerges in our final dossier in honor of Herrick Chapman, perhaps most explicitly in its final essay by sociologist Éric Fassin. Fassin argues that the recent surge of politicized attacks on the academy, an onslaught felt in both France and the United States, is, ironically, a good sign. So, too, he reasons, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism. “What these campaigns reveal,” Fassin writes, “is that intellectual work is not to be dismissed; it is dangerous. It turns out it is important. Otherwise, why should it be demonized thus?” Fassin arrives at the conclusion through personal experience. As he recounts, he captured the attention of former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who launched his far-right campaign in 2021 with a video telling viewers (“chers compatriots”) that they were “despised” by academics, Fassin included.

One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in “scientific” studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category “race,” despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as “races” groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a “race?” Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the “metalanguage” of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention.

What is the audience for French Studies in the Anglophone world? Who is interested in reading about France, and what kinds of books, essays, and articles arouse their curiosity?

Teaching at New York University's Institute of French Studies from 1989 to 1994 made me realize how the intellectuel, a figure that first emerged during the Dreyfus Affair and has continued to play a significant role in French history throughout the twentieth century, makes sense in what I then called a “transatlantic mirror.” In the United States, or at least among American academics, it signifies Frenchness. It may even be part of the attraction of French Studies for students with intellectual aspirations. Indeed, the term needs to be qualified to be translated into English: the public intellectual is defined by his (and sometimes her) public beyond academia. So is the French intellectuel—but that goes without saying: the public dimension defines both the word and the man (much more often than the woman: écriture inclusive might be misleading here). It is hard to imagine a nonpublic one. Intellectuel privé would sound like a contradiction in terms, unless followed by a complement: de son public. For American students of France, the desire to address a wider audience, beyond the proverbial “ivory tower,” thus affirms the public relevance of intellectual work; and this is in part in reaction against the long history of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life recounted by American historian Richard Hofstadter in the wake of McCarthyism in in his eponymous book of 1963.

A profound sentiment of satisfaction might settle upon Herrick Chapman after he reads the articles in this special issue. For having touched so many lives, for having excelled in the intellectual endeavors he set out to explore, and for having made an impact on the field of French Studies itself, any soul would be rightly moved to a sense of completion and contentedness that accompanies such lifetime achievement. Teaching, research, and service are the core responsibilities of all tenure-stream academics, but Chapman has fulfilled these missions to an extraordinary degree to which few can aspire. In addition to this triple crown, his career is matched by a life well lived, one in which family, friendship, joy, and love are so abundant that they infuse his professionalism.

A body in motion, said Isaac Newton, will stay in motion; and so, too, will a body at rest stay at rest, unless they are acted upon by some external force. A human body is such an object, or rather, a system of articulated tissues that are set in motion and stilled by various internal (electrical signals from the brain, chemical reactions in the muscles) and external (gravity, heat, wind, pies thrown in one's face, etc.) forces.

This article offers an ethnographic account of Bengaluru, a city in southern India, marked for its crippling urban infrastructures, frequent traffic jams, and burgeoning IT economy. The article asks if there's a relationship between how one labors inside glass enclaves and the congestion experienced outside on the road. In trying to answer this question, it interweaves three situations of “rooming,” “switching,” and “ordering” traversed by IT workers on a daily basis. These situations foreground how the everyday dispositions of bodies are consistently negotiating with im/mobilities in how one passes through life and labor, which, in turn, assembles the city, or makes it happen—as an event—in a particular way.

In this article, a single road, the Roper Highway, in the Northern Territory of Australia becomes a focus for the exploration of colonization, mobilities, separation, and continuing inequalities for Indigenous people in the region. We argue that the needs of the people situated at the end of the road are usually secondary to those of strategy and big business. We bring together perspectives from participant observation, traveling the road, historical accounts and contemporary experience, to describe the Roper Highway as a meshwork of intersecting biographies, histories, interests, and experiences and explore why, despite our extensive experience as anthropologists driving this road, our knowledge of the road from the perspective of the people we worked with remained elusive and incomplete.

Coastal urban edges, defined by significant spaces of mobilities, create tensions in the oppositions of flows of the practices of vision and action. Photography captures moments and tells fragments of stories. A closer, longer look of photographic images allows for otherwise un-noticed details. We notice the gendered automobilities at play in the coastal roadways and street spaces of Brighton, UK and Havana, Cuba, both renowned for their celebration of speed from car racing and testing. This article analyses selected photographic images from two archives situated in Brighton and Havana. We consider the impact of pre-determined and applied axes and planes of the spaces, considering the intentions before, and the imaginary afterlife of the images. Our analysis adds to an understanding of speed and injustice at the coastal urban edge.

Nomad Dreams / Sueños Nómads reflects on how Indigenous and Latinx artists employ creative social interactions and installations to address issues of mobility, space, power, agency, affect, place, capitalism, and subjectivity. Transfers readers will become acquainted with a dynamic space marking a complex power structure that interweaves the mass media effects upon the migrant subjectivity, the nation-state policing mobility, the illicit enrichment of the Coyote mafia, and irregular population movements traveling up north from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Central America. The project mainly focuses on experiencing subjectivity as an affected pedagogical tool to—in some cases, heal the consequences of irregular mobility—understand, discuss, and recognize how Indigenous and Latinx migrants are constantly reshaping mobility, sociocultural production, and the variability of transnational landscapes.

David Machado, The Shelf Life of Happiness, trans. Hillary Locke (Seattle: Amazon Crossing, 2016), 236 pp., $14.95 (paperback).

Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle (New York: Doubleday, 2021), 336 pp., $18.00 (paperback).

Mobility platforms have been transforming cities for fifteen years now. Research on these platforms is in robust shape, but there are emerging tensions surrounding how we frame and research platforms’ effects. Increasingly, two opposing views are coalescing. On the one hand, platforms are seen through a Marxist lens as part of an urban spatial fix. On the other hand, research grounded in Feminist geographies, Black, and Queer studies, sees a spatial fix approach as a totalizing one that denies the complexity and political possibility of platforms. We argue that these approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Paying attention to the relationship between mobility and fixity can help scholars remain attentive to mobility platforms’ political and economic heft, while mitigating a tendency to frame platforms as purely symptomatic of an all-encompassing neoliberalism. We illustrate our arguments by thinking through the relationship between fixity and mobility with respect to capital, labor, and ideas.