09/08/2008

History Professor Popkin to Lecture at Collège de France

University of Kentucky historian Jeremy D. Popkin will deliver a series of lectures at the prestigious Collège de France in Paris, France, in May 2009. Popkin, a specialist in the history of the French Revolution, has been invited to speak on “The Press in the Revolutionary Era.”

Founded by French king François I in 1530 to promote the study of classical languages, the Collège de France has been called the world’s oldest humanities institute. The Collège, located in the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter, does not have enrolled students or offer degrees. Its lectures are open to the general public.

“What the Collège de France offers its audiences are not received ideas, but the notion of unconstrained inquiry,” philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one of its professors, wrote. Other world-famous lecturers at the Collège have included the political scientist Raymond Aron, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the philosopher Michel Foucault, and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Popkin, the T. Marshall Hahn, Jr., professor of history at UK, has published and edited numerous books on the history of the French and Haitian Revolutions and on the nature of autobiography. He first visited Paris as a child. “I remember my father showing me the buildings of the Collège de France,” Popkin said, “but I never dreamed I would some day give lectures there.”