Dr. Ian Germani

Ian Germani is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Regina, where he has taught since 1987.  He served as Department Head from 2004-2007 and from 2009-2013.  He received his PhD from Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario) in 1983.  Recent publications include “Terror in the Army:  Representatives on Mission and Military Justice in the armies of the French Revolution,” in The Journal of Military History (2011), which received a Moncado Award from the Society for Military History.  Current research continues to focus on war and culture as well as on the politics of public space in 20^th-century Paris.

Project: “The Soldier’s Death: From Valmy to Verdun”

This project explores representations of the soldier’s death in France from the wars of the French Revolution to the First World War.  It considers the ways in which the soldier’s death was represented in various media, including academic painting, popular engravings, theatre, newspaper reports, songs, film and memorial sculpture.  A central theme includes the relationship between official representations idealizing the death of the soldier and unofficial representations provided by soldiers themselves which sometimes evoked the horror or futility of the soldier’s death. This research will enhance understanding of mentalités in modern France by considering how attitudes toward the soldier’s death were affected by republican and nationalist ideologies as well as by two unprecedented experiences of mass killing, situated just over a hundred years apart.

Conversation

HRI
What motivated or sparked you to become a humanities researcher/scholar?

IG
My research, which relates to the disciplines of History, Art History, English and French literature as well as Cultural Studies is most aptly described as a project in the “humanities.”  I think it is a very appropriate project, therefore, for the Humanities Research Institute.

HRI
How did you come to your research/disciplinary specialization?

IG
As a graduate student, I studied both the cultural history of the French Revolution and Military History.  Since then, I have worked to bring those two areas of interest together, by researching how war was represented in the media of the French Revolution.  More generally, I have sought to follow in the footsteps of historians like George Mosse and Michael Paris who have studied the ways in which the media have served in the 19^th and 20^th centuries to prepare and mobilize societies for war.  They have helped me to understand better the significance of the military comics I read as a child.

HRI
What future plans do you have for your research and its direction?

IG
The subject of the death of the soldier is an immensely rich one.  I envisage broadening the scope of my inquiry to consider a survey of this theme extending from ancient times to the present.

HRI
Which humanities scholar or creative practitioner inspires you and why?

IG
Professor Emeritus Brian E. Rainey, of the Department of French, continues to inspire me by his skill as a translator of the French language.  Despite a career spent working with French texts, my translations are unworthy things in comparison with his.  Also, his enthusiasm for the work of Micheline Tison-Braun on La Crise de l’Humanisme (the Crisis of Humanism) inspired me to take a fresh look at the French literature of the First World War.

HRI
What are two things about your humanities research that make them relevant to other researchers, scholars or students? To the broader public?

IG
Sadly, war appears to be a permanent feature of the human condition.  Attitudes toward war in contemporary society are quite ambiguous.  As we reflect on our military pasts, our sentiments range from celebration to shame.  We also wrestle with the dilemmas of contemporary military commitments:  how many deaths is too many? How can those deaths be justified?  Understanding how French society addressed those issues in extremis, at times when they were of wrenching personal import to millions, can help inform our own debates and understanding.

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Update January 2016:

Here is a short list of some of the work I have accomplished recently in relation to my HRI Project, “The Soldier’s Death:  From Valmy to Verdun.”

A revised version of the paper I presented at Deakin University, Geelong, Australia, in July, 2014, has just been published:  “The Soldier’s Death:  From Valmy to Verdun,” in French History and Civilisation:  Papers from the George Rudé Seminar , vol. 6 (2015):  133-148.  Available at:  http://www.h-france.net/rude/rudepapers.html

I presented a paper entitled “The Soldier’s Death in French Culture, 1789-1918,” at the twentieth meeting of the Group for War and Culture Studies, at the University of Westminster, London, England, in July 2015.  I have since revised the paper for submission to the Journal of War and Culture Studies.

I presented a paper entitled “Representations of the Soldier’s Death:  France, 1914-1918,” to a conference on The Great War’s Shadow: New Perspectives on the First World War, hosted by the University of Calgary at Lake Louise, Alberta, in September, 2014.  The article has since been revised for inclusion in a collection of essays to be entitled Watershed:  The Great War of 1914-1918 as a Turning Point in History and Culture, which derived from the HRI-supported lecture series held at the University of Regina in 2014 to commemorate the centenary of the Great War.  The manuscript of the collection is currently under review.