Collecting and Reading the Dreyfus Affair: Postcards, Photo Albums, and Journals

While the newspapers were crucial in forming public opinions around the Dreyfus Affair, lesser-studied mediums such as postcards, photo albums, and journals gave rise to new modes of narrative production in this context while fulfilling the role of collectibles. This lecture explores various archival collections, including the Lorraine Beitler Collection, to show how these mediums were not just popular artifacts but also "literary objects" - a form of popular literature - in complement to newspapers or could have become, at some point, a reading media in their own right. Thus, we will consider how the visual representation of the Affair might have been read.

About the Speaker

A historian and literary scholar, Karine Macarez is a PhD student in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research exploits mediums such as postcards and sound archives to examine the media's influence on the spread of French antisemitism, particularly during the Dreyfus Affair and World War II. 

In 2024 Macarez was selected for the Lorraine Beitler Research Fellowship, a bi-annual, one-month fellowship open to scholars interested in working with the extensive resources of the Lorraine Beitler Collection of the Dreyfus Affair.