On Thursday June 20, the French Academy [L’Académie française] awarded 71 prizes and distinctions. Our warmest congratulations to French historian Pierre Singaravélou, whose latest book, Fantômes du Louvre: Les musées disparus du XIXe siècle (Éditions Hazan, 2023).

Pierre Singaravélou, who spent his childhood in Guadeloupe, is a British Academy Global Professor at King’s College London and Professor of History at Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He has published numerous works on colonial, imperial, and global histories. Among his many publications are Les Mondes d’Orsay (2021); Décolonisations (2020), with Marc Ball and Karim Miské; Tianjin Cosmopolis. Une histoire de la mondialisation en 1900 (2017); and Professer l’Empire. Les « Sciences coloniales » en France sous la IIIe République (2011).

Book description: At a time when the universalist claims of Western museums are the subject of debate, historian Pierre Singaravélou travels back in time to understand how the Louvre became, in a little over two centuries, a special case in the history of museums: an extraordinary laboratory of experimentation in perpetual reconfiguration.

Undertaking research into the traces of museums created in the mid-19th century to increase the areas of expertise of the Louvre (Naval Museum, Ethnographic Museum, Spanish Gallery, Algerian Museum, Mexican Museum, Chinese Museum, etc.), he breathes new life into “ ghosts” who lived in these places and repopulates the museum with all these objects that came from “elsewhere” (which, today, have largely disappeared) that brought the world to the Louvre from its inception.

For more information, see https://www.academie-francaise.fr/les-prix-et-fondations-prix-litteraires/les-laureats

Book description translated by Ivette Romero. For the original, see https://www.editions-hazan.fr/livre/fantomes-du-louvre-les-musees-disparus-du-xixe-siecle-chaire-du-louvre-9782754113236/

For more on the author, see https://france-amerique.com/pierre-singaravelou-history-from-the-perspective-of-the-colonized/ and https://www.pantheonsorbonne.fr/page-perso/psingarave