Pierre Birnbaum
Visting Professor

Pierre Birnbaum, professor at the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris, is one of France's most eminent political sociologists and a widely recognized authority on the political history of Jews in France. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, NYU, the New School for Social Research, Indiana University, Oxford, Edinburgh, Florence, Rome, Geneva, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Bogota. Author or co-author of seventeen books and numerous articles, a number of his works and edited collections have been published in English, including The Jews of the Republic: An History of State Jews from Gambetta to Vichy (Stanford, 1996), Paths for Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship (Princeton, 1995), Anti-Semitism in Modern France: A Political History from Léon Blum to the Present (Oxford, 1992), States and Collective Action: European Experiences (Cambridge, 1988), among others. Professor Birnbaum was invited to Northwestern by FIG during the Fall quarter, 1999, and taught two courses. French C90: "Culture and Identity: The Jews in France," examined the question of identity, culture and nation-belonging, using the Jewish case within French history as the main example. Using different kinds of documents (pamphlets, essays, novels, academic writings), the course confronted the question of multiculturalism's legitimacy in contemporary France. Professor Birnbaum also gave, in English, a special topics course, Political Science C90, entitled "State, Citizenship and Nationalism," explored the relationship between the state and the nation as defined by language, culture, and/or ethnicity.