UVM History Department Blog

“Five Questions With…” is a monthly feature on our blog that profiles a member of the UVM history department.

To request a profile of a particular history department professor or staff member, or to submit questions for consideration for particular professors, please email history@uvm.edu with the subject line “Five Questions.”

This month, we are chatting with Professor Steve Zdatny.  Professor Zdatny specializes in the history of France and modern Europe, and particularly twentieth-century French social history.  He received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, with a concentration on modern French history. He is  currently working on a modern history of hygiene in France.

What made you want to become an historian?

I had always liked reading books and watching films and tv shows about history. It never seemed to me like a thing “to do.” Growing up I didn’t know and had never met anyone who was a “historian”—or who was a college professor of any subject, for that matter. At university I dropped an early Psych major and had to give up my science ambitions because I wasn’t a very responsible student—plus I kept breaking things in Chemistry lab. But I loved my History classes and was especially inspired by the great historian of twentieth-century Germany, William Sheridan Allen—the beard, the tweed jacket, the pipe, and the brilliance of him. I took an M.A. after my B.A., mostly because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, then spent a couple of years as a teamster and a salesman, before deciding to go back for my doctorate. I still think of the acceptance letter from the University of Pennsylvania as the happiest moment in my happy life. Grad school was hard work and wore off a lot of that initial joy. But all’s well that ends well, right?

Professor Zdatny in college

Why modern French history?

I wrote my first book, The Politics of Survival, about petty enterprise and fascist politics in 20^th-century France. My second monograph, Fashion, Work and Politics in Modern France, is a history of the Hairdressing profession, combining labor history with the history of fashion. In the interim, I knocked off an edited book titled, Hairstyles and Fashion: A Hairdresser’s History of Paris, 1910-1920, which amazon.com tells me is the most successful of my books. At the moment, I am preparing to head off to Paris for the spring on a Fulbright grant to work on my latest book project, a history of hygiene in France from the middle of the 19^th century to the end of the 20^th. It aims to explore what happens to the way people think about and treat their bodies as France modernizes. (Spoiler alert: the French start off dirty and smelly, by American standards, but things get a lot better.)

If you could live in any historical period for a week, which would it be, and why?

When I first got to graduate school, in an era when history “from below” and Marxism dominated the faculty at Penn, I once (unwisely) expressed the view that I’d love to have been an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army at a ball at Emperor Franz Joseph’s Schoenbrunn Palace, checking my sword at the door and twirling all night in my dress uniform to Strauss waltzes (with Strauss conducting). I recall my professor looking at me as if I had just stomped a puppy to death. But, honestly, I thought it would be fun to wear a sword and dance at the imperial palace. I would have liked my week to be over, though, before World War I started.

What’s the best historical book you’ve read recently?

This summer I read the most extraordinary book about the origins of World War I—The Sleepwalkers—by the Cambridge historian Christopher Clark. The book appeared last year to much fanfare; in fact, Professor Clark gave the plenary talk at last year’s meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies (of which I am the current executive director) in Montreal in April. Three things impressed me about the book. The first was the massive amount of research it represented. The book is some 800 pages, of which probably 250 are endnotes. The second was the author’s focus on some of the issues that are normally neglected by the many books on “the origins of the First World War”: Serbia, the Balkan Wars. The third was Clark’s perspective, which held Germany much less responsible for the outbreak of the war than is common. On the other side, France, which is normally held to be a perfectly innocent party in the war’s outbreak (not unreasonably, since German invaded France and not vice-versa) receives rather rough treatment in Clark’s analysis, not for having actually started the war—Serbia and Russia take first prize in that sweepstakes—but for having been irresponsible in egging their Russian ally on to action in the Balkans, knowing full well where it might lead. I can’t imagine a more thorough treatment of the issue.

What are you up to when you’re not on campus?

I am an amateur heart surgeon, a cat burgler, and an astronaut. Also, I love to play ice hockey, tennis, and golf.