🗓️When: Friday 15 May, 3–4pm
📍Where: 407 Babel Building, The University of Melbourne
“Writing the history of the French landscape 1770-2020”
The French countryside is as beloved by the many millions of tourists who visit it each year as it is of French people themselves. But it has not always looked like it does today. The countryside in which people live and work and through which they travel is a human creation, especially across the last 250 years of economic and cultural change, war and revolution. The ‘making’ of the French landscape is a story linking human geography, history, agriculture and culture, from the aristocratic control of agrarian resources in the 1770s, to widespread mechanisation in the 19th century, through to the impact of the World Wars and the uncertain future of French rural communities in the ‘Age of the Anthropocene’.
Peter McPhee was appointed to a Personal Chair in History at the University of Melbourne in 1993. He was President of the Academic Board, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) and then the University’s first Provost in 2007-09. He is now an Emeritus Professor. He has published widely on the history of France since 1770, most recently Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (2016) and An Environmental History of France: Making the Landscape, 1770-2020 (2024). He is currently the Chair of the History Council of Victoria, the state’s peak body for history, and Patron of the History Teachers Association of Victoria.