La Commune 2021 — with Roxanne Panchasi and Brit Bachmann

About La Commune 2021From March 18th through early June 2021, writer and scholar Roxanne Panchasi will be hosting a virtual free school focused on the Paris Commune of 1871 in collaboration with UNIT/PITT Society for Art and Critical Awareness. Lasting 10-12 weeks, the free school will be open to the wider public. Anyone can participate by taking in the content shared each week, by attending online events (including screenings, discussions, and presentations by special guests, etc.). Participants can follow the whole of the school's run and/or drop in to check out specific materials or happenings on offer. How much or how little of the free school experience participants engage with is entirely up to them. Free in this instance means without charge, but also without course/attendance requirements, assignments, grades or participant evaluation of any kind.Roxanne PanchasiRoxanne is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in the twentieth and twenty-first century France, and the French empire, and its legacies. Her first book, Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars was published by Cornell University Press in 2009. She has written on a range of subjects including: nineteenth-century graphology, prosthetics, the Paris Commune, experimental film, and the teaching of History. Her current book project focuses on the cultural politics of French nuclear weapons and testing in the Algerian Sahara. In it, she examines military, scientific, diplomatic, literary, audio-visual, testimonial, and memorial sources as a broad archive of the"French" bomb in empire. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History Present. In 2013, Dr. Panchasi launched New Books in French Studies, a podcast channel featuring discussions with scholars of France and the Francophone world about their latest books that she hosts on the New Books Network. Brit BachmannBrit Bachmann is a multidisciplinary artist who writes, draws, and throws clay in Vancouver, Canada, on unceded land belonging to the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She is the Executive Director of UNIT/PITT Society for Art & Critical Awareness, and co-founder of ReIssue with Casey Wei. Brit has previously worked in administration and outreach at VIVO Media Arts Centre, Capture Photography Festival, The Cinematheque; and notably, as Editor-In-Chief of Discorder Magazine (2015-18). She has served on the programming committee of CFRO Vancouver Co-op Radio (2015-18), and the Polaris Music Prize jury (2016-19). Brit is a member of the Board of Directors of VIVO Media Arts Centre, and the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres (PAARC). She has a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of British Columbia–Okanagan.