Chères et chers collègues,

La prochaine séance du séminaire A19, organisée en collaboration avec Nineteenth-Century Worlds, aura lieu le mercredi 30 avril de 14h à 15 h30, en salle 830, bât. Olympe de Gouges, Université Paris Cité, et sur Zoom.

J. Michelle Coghlan (University of Manchester) présentera sa monographie Louise Michel in America (à paraître chez Rutgers University Press) et Thomas Caubet (Université Paris Cité) sera le discutant.

Louise Michel journeyed far beyond France—enduring forced exile in New Caledonia and chosen exile in London; touring Europe in the early 1880s; and voyaging to Algeria in 1904, in the final months of her life. But unlike comrades such as Peter Kropotkin (and Mikhail Bakunin before him), she never visited America, as plans for her much-anticipated US lecture tour were scrapped in 1897 under intense US government pressure. Yet even from afar, this celebrated—and infamous—anarchist orator, educational activist, and former Communarde made her presence felt across the United States both during and long after her lifetime. Louise Michel in America uncovers her expansive influence on late-nineteenth-century American radicals—especially Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Lucy Parsons—and her outsized presence in US culture at large. That Michel once mattered so much to so many reveals not only nineteenth-century US radicals’ internationalist circuits of affiliation, but also how national borders—and her demarcation as French—continue to obscure the importance of those cross-national ties, despite decades of transnational scholarship and recent work tracing the Commune’s global ripples. As historian Constance Bantman notes, virtually no work has explored Michel’s legacy outside France or the activist networks she helped build in exile. Louise Michel in America tells that riveting and untold story—and in doing so, helps us reframe both the Commune and nineteenth-century radicalism “on the move,” highlighting radicalism’s prominent place in US print culture and what Kristin Ross calls the Commune’s enduring “centrifugal effects.” The chapter I’ll present for W19/A19, “Epistolary Activism: Re-tracing Louise Michel’s US Radical Networks,” recovers Michel’s under-appreciated footprint in US radical periodicals and circles by way of her essays and speeches, reports on her lectures and radical experiments like the free International School she founded in London in 1891, and the letters she exchanged with US radicals. I argue this overlooked archive helps to adumbrate not just how US radicals heard or read about Michel, but how they came to think with and be moved by her.

J. Michelle Coghlan is Senior Lecturer of American literature at the University of Manchester (UK). She is the author of Sensational Internationalism: the Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh UP, 2016), which was awarded the 2017 Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize, and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food (Cambridge UP, 2020). Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics (Cambridge UP, 2025), American Literature in Transition: 1876-1910 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Food and Literature (Cambridge UP, 2018), Nineteenth Century French Studies, Poe Studies, the Journal of American Studies, Resilience: A Journal of the Humanities, and Arizona Quarterly. She recently co-edited, with John Funchion, the “Radical Henry James” special issue of the Henry James Review. Her current book project, Louise Michel in America, is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press.