THOMAS DODMAN
Department of History
Associate Professor of French, History & Comparative Literature
Department Profile
I am a historian of modern France and its empire, with a broad training in social, cultural and intellectual history, and interdisciplinary interests in psychoanalysis, anthropology, political economy, and the deep ties between history and literature. My research interests and teaching range widely, from French colonialism in Algeria and contemporary francophone transfuges writers, to the history of political philosophy and the enduring question of why human beings return. In general, I like to investigate collective moments of social transformation – wars, revolutions, mass migrations… - and how they are experienced at an individual level, as lives of the in-between. My first book, What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (Chicago, 2018; French translation Nostalgie: Histoire d’une émotion mortelle (Seuil, 2023)) examined how people once died of nostalgia in order to tell a larger story about modernity, mental illness and alienation in a time of war and imperialism. In Les Volontaires: roman familial de la Révolution française (Seuil, 2025; English translation forthcoming) I zeroed in on the rocambolesque lives of three anonymous individuals during and after the French Revolution, harnessing the tools of microhistory and literature to tell the story of these ordinary “silhouettes” in extraordinary times. I am currently working on the genre-defying auto-socio-biographical literature of French writer Annie Ernaux. In future, I’d like to explore the fiction and political writings of the Palestinian critic Ghassan Kanafani.
At Columbia I teach in French, History, ICLS and the Core. I co-chair the Affect Studies seminar and direct the History and Literature (HiLi) MA at Columbia’s Global Center in Paris. I also coedit the interdisciplinary journal Sensibilités: histoire, critique & sciences sociales (Anamosa)
