Participant Info
- First Name
- Hannah
- Last Name
- Frydman
- Country
- United States
- State
- MA
- hfrydman@fas.harvard.edu
- Affiliation
- Harvard University
- Website URL
- Keywords
- modern France, women, gender, sexuality, reproduction, sex work, media, reading, press freedom, republican culture, print culture, capitalism, labor
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
I am an assistant professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University where I teach on the history and culture of modern France, with an emphasis on histories of women, gender, sexuality, race, and print and digital cultures, and conduct research on the intersections between sexuality, media, and capitalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Paris.
My first book Between the Sheets: Classified Advertising, Sexuality, and the Moral Threat to the Free Press in France (Cornell University Press, 2025) 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.
- Recent Publications
“‘Confidences épistolaires de la Vénus publique’: Real-time Communication, Voyeuristic Reading, and Social Media’s Erotic Pre-History in the Petite Correspondance.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 52, nos. 1–2 (Fall–Winter 2023–24): 89–106.
“Reading Incognito: Periodicals, Sapphic Fictions, and Lesbian Communication.” Dix-Neuf 26, no. 1 (2022): 35–55.
“Freedom’s Sex Problem: Classified Advertising, Law, and the Politics of Reading in Third Republic France.” French Historical Studies 44, no. 4 (October 2021): 675–709. (Winner, Malcolm Bowie Prize and Charles R. Bailey Prize).
“‘Les dessous des petites annonces’: quand les intimités se marchandent à la quatrième page des journaux (IIIe République).” Histoire, économie & société 39, no. 3 (September 2020): 45–66 (co-authored with Claire-Lise Gaillard).
“Capitalism’s Back Pages: ‘Immoral’ Advertising and Invisible Markets in Paris’s Mass Press, 1880–1940.” In Capitalism’s Hidden Worlds, 119–138. Edited by Kenneth Lipartito and Lisa Jacobson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
“Policing Backpage and the Backpages.” Public Books, April 19, 2018.
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- @hannah_frydman
- Country Focus
- France
- Expertise by Geography
- France, Western Europe
- Expertise by Chronology
- 19th century, Modern, 20th century
- Expertise by Topic
- Book History, Capitalism, Gender, Labor, Sexuality, Urban History, Women
