Mary Lou Roberts
Professor

Email: maryroberts@wisc.edu
Phone: (608)263-1973
Office: 5101 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 5003 Mosse Humanities

Office Hours: TBA

Education: PhD: Brown University; MA: Sarah Lawrence College; BA: Wesleyan University

Bio Sketch:

My specialization is Women and Gender; France; the Second World War

My Research Interests:   My latest book,  which will appear sometime next year,  concerns  the politics of sex during the American presence in France during the Second World War.    As the GIs conquered Normandy in the summer of 1944, they pursued their fantasies of having sex with French women.  Such erotic contacts—including heterosexual sex, prostitution, and rape—became the focus of conflict and debate between the US military and French officials.   As these debates occurred in newspapers and official correspondence, they anchored larger struggles for authority,  including the breadth of American political power in Europe, and the moral role of the United States as a new global leader. 

Selected Publications:

• Foreign Affairs: Sex, Power and the American G.I. in France, 1944-1946, forthcoming 2012.
• Co-Editor with Paul Friedland, Special issue of French Historical Studies, “Theorized History,” forthcoming, March 2012
• “Out of their Orbit: Celebrity and Eccentricity in Nineteenth Century France,” The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminism, eds. Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 50-79.
• “The Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease and the American Military in France, 1944-1946,” American Historical Review, 115, no. 4 (October 2010):1002-1030
• “Retinking Female Celebrity: The Eccentric Star in Nineteenth Century France,” Charisma, Fame, and Celebrity during the Long 19th Century, eds. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 103-116
• “The Silver Foxhole: Prostitution in Paris, 1944-1945,” French Historical Studies, 33: 1 (Winter 2010), 99-128.
• “Wartime Flânerie: The Zucca Controversy” French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 27, no. 1, Spring 2009, 102-110. [About a controversial 2008 exhibit in Paris concerning the city during WWII]
• “En Lisant les thèses et les HDR, De la gestion à la citoyenneté. Une Histoire sociale de la consommation contemporaine de Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel,” Entreprises et Histoires, no. 55, June 2009, 9-13.
• “Photographier le G.I.: eroticisme et photojournalisme en France pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, ” Rretour à l’intime au sortir de la guerre: De la Première Guerre mondiale à nos jours (Paris: Editions Tallandier, 2009), 259-278.
• “The Frondeuse: Making the Modern Girl French,” The Modern Girl Around the World: Globalization, Modernity, and Consumption, eds. Uta Poiger et al, Duke University Press, 2009 77-95.
• Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin de Siecle France, University of Chicago Press, 2002.
• Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Post-war France, 1918-1928, Women in Culture and Society Series, edited by Catherine Stimpson, Univesity of Chicago Press, January 1994.
  

Awards:

• Senior Fellowship,  Institute for Research in the Humanities,  2010-2014
• Honorable Mention,  Koren Prize,  Society for French Historical Studies, 2011
• John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 2007-2008
• Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, 2008

Courses Taught:

Lecture Courses:

• History 120 - Europe & Modern World 1815-present
• History 392 - Women in History

Undergraduate Seminars:

• History 200 - Historical Studies - Topics: "Twentieth Century as Lived Experience"
• History 600 - Advanced Seminar in History - Topics: "Women, Gender, & War in 20th Century"

Graduate Courses:

• History 891 - Pro-seminar in Modern European History - Topics: "Rise & Fall of the Domestic Ideal"; "Gender & Race in European History"