Talk by Professor Emerita, Sharon Farmer | Fowl Play: France and beyond, 1979…

The History Department will host  SHARON FARMER, Professor Emerita (UCSB),  who will present a talk, entitled “Fowl Play: France and beyond, 1979…” 

When: 12:00 PM, Thursday, January 12th.

Where: HSSB 4020. 

The chapter from which Farmer will be reading deals with the time she spent in France in 1979-80, when she first began the research for her doctoral dissertation in medieval history. Like M.F. K. Fischer, Farmer describes an era that is now separated from us by historical rupture: in  Fischer’s case, the rupture was caused by a world war; in Farmer’s, it was caused by the invention of the internet, which has profoundly altered the experience of living and traveling in another country.  Like Marcel Proust,  Farmer uses the five senses to convey the intensity of certain memories and the non-linear ways in which those memories unfold for us.  The chapter also attempts to answer a simple question: how is it that the 27-year old woman who found herself incapable of purchasing a live chicken (which would have been butchered for her on the spot) in Tours, France, in 1979, became the woman who raised and then slaughtered and ate twelve quail in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 2020?  She also calls into question, in light of her own growing interests in migrant rights and post-colonial perspectives, the France that she invented for herself in 1979.