In recent years my research interests have broadened to include both Russia and the United States. I have long been fascinated by the writings of the nineteenth-century Russian radical émigré Alexander Herzen, and I plan to include a chapter on Herzen in my book on 1848. In recent years I have also made four research trips to Moscow to work in the former Central Party Archives. One fruit of that research is an article on the Marx-Engels Institute and its founder, David Riazanov, which appeared in the Journal of Modern History last year. Currently I’m working on a related article on the great French historian of Russian culture and Russian religion, Pierre Pascal, who worked at the Marx-Engels Institute in the 1920s. It is titled “The Making and Unmaking of a Christian Bolshevik: The Soviet Years of Pierre Pascal.”

I often assign novels in my courses in French history and European and Russian intellectual history. In Russian Intellectual History we read Dostoevsky’s Demons and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons; I generally assign novels by Stendhal and Balzac in my course on nineteenth-century France; and my survey course on nineteenth-century Europe (History 30B) is built around three novels: Dickens’ Hard Times, Lampedusa’s The Leopard, and Joseph Roth’s Radetsky March. One American writer whose fiction has long fascinated me is Herman Melville, and in recent years I’ve begun to publish and to lecture on Melville. My most recent dive into the crowded waters of Melville scholarship was a talk given at a Herman Melville-Frederick Douglass Conference at the New Bedford (Mass.) Whaling Museum, which was published in June 2007 in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies under the title “Echoes of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution in Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’.”

Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. French translation, Paris: Editions Fayard, 1993. Japanese translation, Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2001.

The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love and Passionate Attraction, tr. and ed. with R. Bienvenu. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972. Second edition, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983

Articles

"Echoes of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution in Melville's 'Benito Cereno,'" Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, IX, 2 (June 2007), 43-58

"Two Concepts of Utopia," Australian Journal of French Studies, 43 (2006)

"French Socialism in Lenin's and Stalin's Moscow: David Riazanov and the French Archive of the Marx-Engels Institute," Journal of Modern History, 78 (2006), 119-143. (With Valerii Fomichev)

"Building Utopia in the Promised Land: Icarians and Fourierists in Texas," in François Lagarde (ed.), The French in Texas: History, Migration, Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 197-225

"Désirée Véret or The Past Recaptured = Love, Memory, and Socialism." The Human Tradition in Modern France, K. Vincent and A. Klairmont-Lingo, eds., 69-80. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2000.

"Parody and Liberation in the New Amorous World of Charles Fourier." History Workshop 20 (Autumn 1985), 125-33.