Robespierre’s Lists: Power and Connection in the French Revolutionary Terror

Colin Jones is Emeritus Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London. He has written many books on French history, most recently The Fall of Robespierre (2021), French Revolutionary Lives (2024) and The Shortest History of France (2025). For 2025-26 he is John and Constance Birkelund Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

In the last months of his life, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94), then a major figure on the Committee of Public Safety that was running the Terror, drew up a number of lists of what he called ‘patriots with more or less talent’. Identifying the nearly 200 individuals on these lists and calculating their connections to Robespierre allows us to explore how he built a political network and how this affected the operations of the Terror. It also offers a perspective on why Robespierre was overthrown in July 1794.

Adam Tooze, Shelby Cullom Davis Chair of History at Columbia University

Additional details are forthcoming.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

In this talk, Kira Thurman investigates the rise of Black Europeans in popular music since WWII. After the collapse of European empires, European popular music industries turned to the musical labor of former colonial subjects to reinvent themselves in an increasingly global and English-speaking marketplace. Interpreting many Black European pop stars such as Boney M or Milli Vanilli as Black Americans, however, transatlantic listeners often failed to recognize the musicians performing in front of them as belonging to European history. How, then, do we account for both the overwhelming presence—and discursive absence—of Black Europeans in modern history? This talk seeks to illuminate how musical producers, performers, and their audiences sought to make sense of—and occasionally reject—the category of ‘Black Europe’ in the wake of a newly emerging post-imperial Western Europe.

About the speaker

Kira Thurman is a highly-sought-after and award-winning historian and musicologist. A classically-trained pianist who grew up in Vienna, Austria, Thurman earned her PhD in history from the University of Rochester with a minor field in musicology from the Eastman School of Music. Her research, which has appeared in German Studies Review, the American Historical Review, Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS), Opera Quarterly, and Journal of World History, focuses on two topics that occasionally converge: the relationship between music and national identity, and Central Europe's historical and contemporary relationship with the Black diaspora.

Host

The Institute for European Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

European History Colloquium - Dan Edelstein, William H. Bonsall Professor of French and (by courtesy) of Political Science and History at Stanford University

“Civilization and the Anthropologists"
Thursday April 9, 4:30 pm

120 Mary Ann Wood Dr.

Room B21