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In his latest book, Joshua Sanborn, associate professor of history, explores the history of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality in modern Europe and how various gender roles influenced political and economic developments.
Sanborn coauthored Gender, Sex and the Shaping of Modern Europe: A History from the French Revolution to the Present Day, released in February by Berg Publishers, with Annette F. Timm, assistant professor of history at the University of Calgary, Canada.
The book explores the key transformations of sexual identities and sexuality in Europe over the past 250 years. It focuses on the field of gender history, which Sanborn says is often thought, incorrectly, to be the combination of women’s and men’s history.
“It’s really important that readers understand what gender history is,” he explains. “For students and colleagues alike, there is an unfortunate assumption that gender history is basically women’s history, or that it is women’s history plus men’s history. In fact, gender history is something substantially different. Practitioners of women’s history and men’s history select a particular social group – like women or women in Italy – that they want to study in a variety of ways. Practitioners of gender history focus instead on the ways that ideas about sexual difference and sex-based behaviors inflect a wide variety of historical processes.”
Sanborn uses the example of differing viewpoints about World War I to illustrate the differences between gender history and women’s or men’s history.
“A historian of women writing about World War I would gravitate toward questions like, ‘How did the war affect women’s lives?’” he says. “We, on the other hand, began our discussion by investigating the ways that notions of proper statesmanship among European diplomats were linked to widely accepted masculine codes. As a result, as war approached, many states went to war to protect their ‘honor,’ even though they rationally understood that war was not in their national interest.”
Sanborn stresses that although women’s and men’s history and gender history are different approaches to looking at the political and social aspects of masculinity and femininity, they are not mutually exclusive, but usually complementary. Though, they are conceptually different and this difference is reflected in the book’s structure.
“Instead of tracing the ups and downs of women or of projects of ‘emancipation,’ we structured the book around the major transformations that occurred in modern Europe as a whole – democratic revolutions, the rise of industrial capitalism, the spread of European empires, the devastation of total war, and the enormous cultural and demographic changes associated with the ‘sexual revolution,’” says Sanborn.
Sanborn hopes readers will look at European history differently after finishing the book, which was written to be accessible not only to students and academics, but also to a general audience.
“We did not write this as a ‘textbook’ with bullet points, glossy pictures, sidebars, review questions, and a gasp-inducing price, in part because we wanted this to be readable and interesting on its own for people who run across it at Barnes and Noble or online.”
Sanborn enlisted the help of a number of Lafayette students for Gender, Sex and the Shaping of Modern Europe. Diana Galperin ’08 (Warminster, Pa.), a double major in French and international affairs; Lori Weaver ’06, a history and government & law graduate; Brian Geraghty ’05,a history and religious studies graduate; and Sandamali Wijeratne ’06, anEnglish and international affairs graduate, all helped with different aspects of the book.
A dedicated teacher and mentor, Sanborn also oversees students in their own research, including honors thesis projects conducted byJillian Gaeta ’07 (Middletown, N.J.), a double major in international affairs and French, and Stephanie Stawicki ’04, an international affairs and Russian and Eastern European studies graduate.
Sanborn’s teaching and research interests include Russian and East European history, war and society, peace studies, imperialism, nationalism, and gender studies.
He has published articles and reviews in academic journals and has given presentations at numerous conferences. He is the author of Drafting the Russian Nation, a groundbreaking book on modern Russian and military-social history. He also provided his insights as a Russian history expert during an appearance on History Channel International’s “Global View” program. Sanborn is currently working on his forthcoming book, “Life on the Frontier of Death: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Ecosystem of War in Russia, 1914-1918,” a scholarly monograph about the relationships between soldiers and civilians on the western front in World War I.
Sanborn is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, Council for Advanced Studies in Peace and International Cooperation, and Mellon Foundation. In 2005, he was awarded the Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Lecture Award for distinguished teaching and scholarship.
A member of the American Historical Association, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and Peace History Society, Sanborn serves as chair of the Global Issues subcommittee of the Strategic Planning Steering Committee at Lafayette. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in history from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in history from Stanford University.
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