Philip G. Nord

Philip Nord studies the political and cultural history of modern France. After earning his B.A. from Columbia University in 1971, Professor Nord went to Balliol College, Oxford University on a Kellett Fellowship to study politics (B. Phil. in 1973). He began teaching at Princeton in 1981 and received his Ph.D. in European history from Columbia the following year. Professor Nord’s first book, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (1986), follows the birth and political evolution of an influential small-business protest movement in late-19th-century Paris. In The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (1995), Nord traces the slow advance of democratic ideas and practices through the institutions of French civil society to explain how and why a lasting republican government took root in France in the 19th century. Nord’s next book, Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century (2000) examines the intersection between Impressionism and republicanism. He is also the coeditor with Nancy Bermeo of Civil Society before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe (2000). Professor Nord was Chair of the History Department from 1995 to 2001. He is affiliated with the French department and the European Politics and Society Program. In 2005 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete research on a book examining the remaking of the French state at the Liberation. That book was published in 2010 under the title France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era. From 2012-2016, Nord was the director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies.

Current Project

Professor Nord is currently working on two projects, a short, synthetic volume that will revisit France's “strange defeat” in 1940 and a longer book provisionally entitled Memories of Deportation. Hundreds of thousands of people were deported from France during the Second World War. How the experience of deportation was remembered and commemorated became a critical bone of contention in the postwar decades.