Idler in the Garden of Knowledge

a) the history of memory in 19th/20th century France (i.e. psychological, biological, philosophical, etc. theories of memory)

b) the history of the human sciences (mainly psychiatry, but anthro/sociology too) in 19th/early 20th century France

c) the problem/puzzle of the reception of Freudian psychoanalysis in early 20th century France

d) the history of history in 19th/20th century France (i.e. how do we get from Romanticism to the positivist école méthodique/institutionalized professional history/to the Annales school), but in a way that moves beyond just a disciplinary history to the more practical, big-picture implications of this shifting relationship to the past.

e) The development/refashioning of French republicanism post-1848, during the Second Empire, and its subsequent, fin-de-siècle institutionalization (i.e. the Third Republic). In particular, questions of republican identity/notions of a republican self and/or sensibility (perhaps we could even talk about this as a perceptual regime?)

f) French anarchism–particularly in terms of cultural politics/as something trendy and/or fashionable to the intellectual/artistic elite. More broadly, how trendy/fashionable was radicalism as a cultural phenomenon throughout the 19th century, and how did that change?

g) Intertwining rhetorics of science and law//the influence of science on late 19th/early 20th century French law (and vice versa?)