Hannah Frydman

This image is a poster for a colloquium titled "Limits of Legibility: History under Siege." White and yellow text on black background. The description reads: "How does critical history address the impasse between conventional history, on the one hand, and aggressive authoritarian rewriting of history, on the other? Given critical history’s theoretical critique of the positivist understanding of facts, what is its response to the assertion of 'alternative facts'? And what impact, if any, can it have on current battles as to what counts as history?" Below this description is a list of participants: Joan W. Scott (Insitute for Advanced Study), Omnia El Shakry (Yale University), Gary Wilder (CUNY Grad Center), and Korey Williams (University of Chicago). The event will take place on March 6th from 2pm to 6pm at Brown University in Pembroke Hall 305.

join us in Providence on March 6th for Limits of Legibility: History under Siege — a colloquium featuring Joan Wallach Scott, Omnia El Shakry, Gary Wilder, and Korey Williams: events.brown.edu/pembroke/eve...

THE MUNBY FELLOWSHIP IS NOW 12 MONTHS!!!!

If you're thinking about applying, do it. As well as the blissful research time and independence to explore unparalleled collections across Cambridge, you get supportive mentorship, great colleagues and a college environment to boot. I loved it.

Review article: the history of sexuality in modern France Sometimes, when I explain that my research expertise lies in the history of sexuality in modern France, the follow-up is some version of a question: ‘so I

Merry Christmas! My state of the field essay on the history of sexuality in Modern France was published in open access yesterday by @frenchhistory.bsky.social. Check it out at academic.oup.com/fh/advance-a...

Thanks, Andrew! Can't wait to read!

It was very fun to grapple with a source that I've found challenging to interpret (Thanks for all your help with this, @rpanchasi.bsky.social)!

Really pleased to announce the launch of the all-new, all-dancing, London Lives website - www.londonlives.org It has been thoroughly re-engineered to facilitate more types of search, and redesigned for phones and tablets. The team very much hopes peope like it. 1/

Poster reads: March 12–14, 2026; Queer Bibliography in the South: Space, Place, Community; University of Georgia, Athens, GA.

Your challenge for this weekend is to put in an abstract for Queer Bibliography 2026. It's what all the cool kids are doing.

The theme is Space, Place, Community (widely understood, certainly not limited to the South). CFP: shorturl.at/XAVJ0; Submit: forms.gle/XD7FgrrStp3j...

Athens GA and online

Farquad mafia

🚨 New article! I'm excited to share “The sodomy consultant of Paris, 1688–1737,” published this week in French Historical Studies: read.dukeupress.edu/french-histo... . A 🧵:

Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press… Join us for a discussion of Hannah Frydman's recently published book Between the Sheets (Cornell University Press, 2025) with CES Resident Faculty Mary D.…

If you’re near @harvard.edu this afternoon, join us for a discussion of @hannahfrydman.bsky.social’s fabulous new book, in conversation with yours truly. ces.fas.harvard.edu/events/2025/...

Flyer for NCFS Unbound

Please join us on Friday to hear @hannahfrydman.bsky.social speak with Raisa Rexer about her brilliant new book, Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France!!! 🔥🔥🔥

A poster for the talk, “The AI heist: how the tech industry exploits the history of art and what we can do to stop it.” Details of the time and location are in the link in the post. The abstract is as follows: Over the last several years, universities and museums have partnered with commercial technology firms like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, who have promised that their AI products will enhance both historical research and accessibility to historical collections. These promises are not supported by the reality of what computer vision-the branch of AI most relevant to the history of art-can achieve. So why have major institutions in education and the arts been so quick to take up these firms' offers? This talk responds to this question by providing an introduction to computer vision's origins in military surveillance, an overview of its development under late capitalist regimes of exploitative micro-labor, and an orientation to how computer vision works. However, the main focus of this talk is not what computer vision does. Rather, I consider the culture of the AI industry, its main objectives, and the dangerous vision for the future that it promises-and whether those promises are credible or even in good faith. This vision for the future has relied on an exploitation of history, and art history in particular, and I argue that it is our responsibility as art historians to be knowledgeable about the forms this exploitation takes. I conclude with suggestions about what we can do to protect the subjects and practitioners of our discipline, as well as education in the humanities more broadly, against this incursion. I do not intend an intransigent rejection of a given technology; rather this talk articulates a challenge that is grounded in knowledge of the historical origins and corporate practices of the AI industry today.

If you’re in the Boston area this Wednesday I’d love for you to come on out! This talk is free and open to the public. as.tufts.edu/art-architec...

Thanks for sharing!

The full LGBTQIA+ Book History Bibliography is here 🏳️‍🌈!!! 650+ items of LGBTQIA+ #BookHistory!!
Check out the intro to see how we made it, the primary bibliography, the article appendix, and the absolutely magnificent zine!!! From monographs to zines, you'll find it here!
sharpweb.org/sharpnews/20...

Yes please!

How have I not seen this? It sounds amazing!

AGAINST AI

teachers!

excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone.

take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE
against-a-i.com

"They certainly didn’t a century ago, when fears about falling birth rates and national decline fueled the expulsion of sexual non-normativity from the pages of a press that sex workers had helped to build— much as sex workers built the internet."

Media, Sex, and Freedom: A Fraught History Hannah Frydman, author of Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France, discusses the history of sexual advertising.

"As sex worker, queer, and, more recently, abortion activists continue to remind us, the rights infringements oppressed communities are experiencing [on the internet] will not stop on the margins."

www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/media-sex-fr...

Media, Sex, and Freedom: A Fraught History Hannah Frydman, author of Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France, discusses the history of sexual advertising.

Hannah Frydman, author of BETWEEN THE SHEETS, discusses the history of sexual #advertising and the modern ways we see #media and #FreeSpeech grapple with sexual content.

@hannahfrydman.bsky.social

Now on the #SageHouseBlog: www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/media-sex-fr...

Hannah Frydman's "Between the Sheets" Hannah Frydman is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures (French) at Harvard University. She applied the “ Page 99 Test ” ...

If you read "Between the Sheets," I wouldn't recommend starting with page 99, but, if you do, this blog post might help!
page99test.blogspot.com/2025/08/hann... @cornellupress.bsky.social @bethanywasik.bsky.social

Media and the History of Sexual Advertising in Between the Sheets Hannah Frydman, author of Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France, discusses the history of sexual advertising.

"'Between the Sheets' reveals a space, hidden in plain sight in Third Republican Paris, where deviant sexualities and lives could be experimented with and financed... That space was the newspaper..." - @hannahfrydman.bsky.social

www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/media-histor...

Be sure to read this new review of FIVE recent books on Algerian History (@tgpeterson.bsky.social, @elisefranklin.bsky.social, Sara Rahnama, Elizabeth Perego, and Susan Slyomovics) by @anaisfaurt.bsky.social in Contemporary European History!

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Copy of the book Between the Sheets sitting on a cafe table in Paris

It's pub day for Between the Sheets! So excited for this book to be officially out in the world. Looking forward to getting the chance to talk about it over the coming months! www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

Between the Sheets by Hannah Frydman | Hardcover | Cornell University Press Between the Sheets reveals a space, hidden in plain sight in Third Republican Paris, where deviant sexualities and lives could be experimented with and financed, despite republican attempts at growing...

BETWEEN THE SHEETS by @hannahfrydman.bsky.social reveals a space where deviant sexualities + lives could be experimented with and financed, despite attempts at norming the population through the heterosexual family.

#NewBooks #CornellUniversityPress

www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

My book, among many others, is currently at 50% off on @cornellupress.bsky.social website with the code 095000. Don’t miss out!

Looks like my book is in this @cornellupress.bsky.social sale! Want to know how a wildly unpopular king trumped up an attack on a Muslim country to justify suspending the rule of law at home? But then ended up getting overthrown himself? This is the book for you 🗃️

In Defense of the Search Bar Mass digitized archival databases are anarchic, rhizomatic places. The search bar makes them this way. This is not to say that large-scale digital librarie

@hannahfrydman.bsky.social looks at the “infinite archive” and its search capability in “In Defense of the Search Bar,” and demonstrates how the “anarchy of the mass digitization and its search bar” can push researchers to “think outside of long-established classifications.” #AHR 🗃️

Really excited that my "In Defense of the Search Bar," which argues that keyword search allows us to queer the archive and how we see the past, is out now in the #AHR! doi.org/10.1093/ahr/...

France’s final nuclear tests in the South Pacific, 30 years on Three decades after France’s last nuclear tests, those living near the test sites still await compensation for the harms caused.

I wrote for @ca.theconversation.com re: the 30th anniversary (this Fri) of President Jacques Chirac's June 13th, 1995 announcement that France would be resuming nuclear testing in the Pacific.

210 detonations in Algeria & Mā'ohi Nui (French Polynesia) from 1960-1996. Thousands of victims.