Biography
Hannah Frydman comes to the UW after a year at Brown University as the Shauna M. Stark '76, P'10 Postdoctoral Research Associate in Gender Studies at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. They are a specialist in the cultural history of modern France, and are especially interested in labor, capitalism, media, reading, gender, sexuality, and the racial politics of reproduction.
They are currently finishing a book, entitled Between the Sheets: Classified Advertising, Sexuality, and the Moral Threat to the Free Press in France (under contract, Cornell University Press), that reconstructs the history of “immoral” classified advertising in the Parisian press during the French Third Republic (1870–1940) to show how sexual and gendered classified advertising opened up new possibilities to live non-normative lives and also inspired state and social efforts to exercise close control over both non-normative bodies and new media in the name of republican morality.
Work from or related to this project has appeared or will appear in French Historical Studies, Dix-Neuf, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, the edited volumes Capitalism’s Hidden Worlds and Queer Print Cultures, and a special issue of Histoire, économie & société on the history of classified advertising, which Frydman co-edited with Claire-Lise Gaillard. This research (conducted in city, departmental, national, and police archives in and around Paris) and writing on classified advertising have been funded by a number of grants, including the ACLS Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies, the P.E.O. Scholar Award, the Chateaubriand Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship.