The 2025 Michel Serres Distinguished Lecture: Stephen Sawyer
Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies
History Department
The Europe Center
450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 260, Stanford, CA 94305
Rm 216
The Department of French and Italian at Stanford University presents:
The 2025 Michel Serres Distinguished Lecture
"Toward a Genealogy of the Modern Demos: Democatic Society and the Problem of Public Authority in the Nineteenth Century"
Stephen Sawyer (Ballantine-Leavitt Professor of History, The American University of Paris)
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.
Free and open to the public.
Sponsored by the Department of French and Italian, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL), the French-Speaking Worlds: Then and Now research group, the Department of History, The Europe Center and the France-Stanford Center at Stanford.