Featured Faculty: Eleanor Rivera

CHFA Featured Faculty: Eleanor Rivera

Dr. Eleanor Rivera

Assistant Professor, Department of History (since 2016)

Education

• Ph.D., Department of History, The University of Chicago (2015)
• M.A., Department of History, The University of Chicago (2007)
• B.A. cum laude, History and French Studies, Smith College (2004)

Q&A

Tell us about your research area. How did you get interested in it?

I am a historian of Modern France with a focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I’m interested in histories of education, childhood, and religion and those histories intersect with broader social changes in France and Europe in this period. 

I had a professor as an undergraduate, Ernest Benz, who really encouraged me to think about my interpretation of historical events and to see people in the past as complex and as complicated as we are today. In graduate school, I started studying debates over the secularization of French education. It’s an issue that is often presented as “black and white,” but in reality, people had many competing interests and often made confusing choices. I started to realize that this was a place where I could add complexity to our historical understanding about ideas on childhood and education in this period.

 

What recent professional accomplishments are you proud of? 

Last year, I published an article about agricultural textbooks for children in late nineteenth-century France (“Stay Farmers: Primary Education and Rural Life in the Early Third Republic”). This article analyzed the way educators portrayed rural life and tried to convince children to “stay farmers” instead of moving to the city. I wasn’t raised on a farm, but I now know a lot about how to run a proper farm in 1890s France (the important thing is to do everything scientifically!).

I’m very excited that an article I’ve been working on for a long time is close to publication. “A New Generation of Iconoclasts: The Curious Case of Classroom Crucifixes, 1880-1906” will appear in French Historical Studies this fall. This article grew out of one of my most memorable research days during my time at the regional archives in Rouen, France. I opened up a box and found descriptions of mayors climbing up ladders and nailing crucifixes to the walls of classrooms and teachers climbing up the same ladders to take them down. I had no idea what was going on, but I was intrigued—and luckily there were two more boxes full of this! In this article, I try to unravel why people were fighting about religious symbols in the classroom and what this tells us about the definition of “secular” in France.

Photo (above): Dr. Rivera presents her work as part of a panel for the Religious Studies program.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m currently getting ready for the France 2020 Education Abroad program to Dijon and Paris in May with Dr. Marcie Hinton in Journalism and Mass Communications, and Christy D’Ambrosio in Education Abroad. I will be teaching HIS 201: The Making of Europe, and have several directed studies students coming on the program. This will be the first time we have had a program based in Dijon, and we are excited about our new partnership with the University of Burgundy. These two sites are good places to experience how European countries transformed from small kingdoms to global empires and then back into nation-states. 

I am also finishing up an article on the construction of schoolhouses in nineteenth century France and thinking about new projects like studying the relationship between children and animals in the nineteenth century. 

What courses do you teach regularly, and what do you hope students take away from your classes? 

I regularly teach classes on European History—join me this fall for HIS 402: Nineteenth Century Europe!—and last spring, I taught Global History of Childhood for the first time. This semester is the second time that I have taught HIS 400, our department’s capstone class. I really enjoy working with students on individual research projects and seeing their ideas develop. This spring our theme is “In the Heart of Jackson’s Purchase: Connecting Local and Global Histories,” and students are using the collections of Pogue Library as the basis for their research. 

I want students to come away from my classes with new knowledge about the past but also skills to help them make sense of ideas, peoples, cultures, and information that is new or different to them. In our classes, this is often in the form of a text written in the past, but in other parts of their life, it could be a new neighbor or the data their boss puts on their desk and tells them to sort through. A good day in class is one where students put the pieces together themselves: the reading they did before class, the primary source we are analyzing together, the discussion we had the day before. I already know how I might interpret the historical evidence we are looking at, but I want to know my students’ take on the same evidence.  

Photo (above): Dr. Rivera with History capstone students in spring 2019.

Why do you think your subject area is important for people to study?

Most of my research is on the nineteenth century. It was a century of changing ideas about the self, politics, religion, and how society should be organized. It is also a century where what Europe thinks about these things were transmitted to the rest of the world. In the French case, this is through their empire in Africa, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Understanding French childhood and education in this period helps us to better understand expectations for “good childhoods” and education in the present as well as debates that we still have about the role of religion in society or how to manage political change.

Thank you so much, Dr. Rivera!