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The Department of French and Italian at Â鶹¸ßÇå presents:

The 2025 Michel Serres Distinguished Lecture

"Toward a Genealogy of the Modern Demos: Democratic Society and the Problem of Public Authority in the Nineteenth Century"
by Stephen Sawyer (Ballantine-Leavitt Professor of History, The American University of Paris)

Abstract:
Examining the period between 1800 and 1850, Sawyer studies a set of thinkers who debated at length over the material problems of everyday life, sparking calls for political action and social reform in the face of conflict wreaked by deforestation, urbanization, health crises, labor relations, industrial capitalism, religious tensions, and imperial expansion. By studying this profound transformation in governance we can better understand the origin and meaning of democracy -- event when events in our own time have thrown the concept into doubt.

Bio:
Stephen W. Sawyer is the Ballantine-Leavitt Professor of History and Director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at the American University of Paris (AUP). Sawyer came to AUP from the University of Chicago center in Paris and the Ecole Normale Supérieure-rue d'Ulm. A specialist in political history and theory, Sawyer earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. He is currently at work on a multivolume study of democracy. The first volume of this project was published in 2018 under the title Demos Assembled: Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840-1880 (University of Chicago Press) and the second volume Demos Rising Democracy and the Popular Construction of Public Power in France, 1800-1850 (University of Chicago Press) has just appeared.

This event is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the , Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL), the French-Speaking Worlds: Then and Now research group, the ,  and the  at Â鶹¸ßÇå.