Gene Marie Tempest
2009: M.Phil., Yale University
2008: M.A., Yale University
2006: B.A. University of California, Berkeley (High Distinction; Phi Beta Kappa)
I am a doctoral candidate specializing in the history of war violence and its environmental effects. My work focuses on the French—and wider European—experiences.
My teaching and research interests include: modern French history; war and society; new approaches to the First World War; war journalism; relationships between warfare and its environments; and the intersections between war, architecture, and urbanism. I have co-designed and co-taught, with Bruno Cabanes, the undergraduate seminar "War and the Environment: From World War I to the Iraq War" (spring 2011).
My dissertation, "Horse Power on the Western Front: The Mobilization, Deployment and Treatment of Horses in the French, British, and American Armies, 1914-1939," is the first to include horses in the historiography of the First World War. I propose that by focusing on equine bodies—in service, sickness, and death—I may not only describe a drastically different physical experience of war, but also write a history of soldiers’ emotional and cultural lives from a uniquely revealing angle.
My thesis is supervised by Bruno Cabanes, John Merriman (co-chair), and Jay Winter (co-chair) at Yale, as well as by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
"Horse Power on the Western Front" has been recognized with a Prize for Excellence from the Historial de la Grande Guerre (2010), and generously supported by a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship in the Humanities in Original Sources (2011-2012), a Council for European Studies Pre-Dissertation Award (2009), and a Yale Program in Agrarian Studies Graduate Student Research Award (2009). Thanks to the Yale Department of French, I spent 2009-2010 conducting research, as an international fellow, from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Publications include: "All the Muddy Horses: Giving a Voice to the ‘Dumb Creatures’ of the Western Front" in Tiere im Krieg (Schöningh Verlag, 2009).
I am also a project director for the online research portal "War and the Environment" (http://warandtheenvironment.commons.yale.edu), a collaboration with Bruno Cabanes and the Yale Instructional Technology Group.
I will be away from Yale for research in 2011-2012.
