John Merriman, former Head of Branford College (1982-1991), is Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale. He researches, writes, and teaches French and Modern European history. He received the American Historical Associations award for career distinguished scholarship. Merriman received Yale University’s Harwood F. Byrnes/Richard B. Sewall Teaching Prize in 2000 adn Yale’s de Vane medal for distinguished scholarship and undergraduate teaching in 2019. He was awarded a Docteur Honoris Causa in France in 2002, and the “Medal of Meritorious Service to Polish Education” (Medal Kimisji Edukacji Narodowej), received from the Ministry of Education of Poland in 2009. Two of his courses are available on line and YouTube through Yale- France since 1871 and Europe, 1648-1945.
Merriman’s recent books include History on teh Margins (2019); A History of Modern Europe since the Renaissance, 2 vols. (1996; second edition 2002, third edition 2009, fourth edition 2019); Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits (2017); Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (2014); Dynamite Club: How a Cafe Bombing Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (2009). Earlier books include The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848-1851 (1978); The Red City: Limoges and the French Nineteenth Century (1985); The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier (1991); The Stones of Balazuc: A French Village in Time (2002). His books have been translated into foreign languages (four in French, four in Chinese, two in Dutch, etc.)
Merriman’s edited books include 1830 in France (1975); Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1979); French Cities in the Nineteenth Century (1981); For Want of a Horse: Chance and Humor in History (1985); Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in Early Modern Europe (with James McClain and Ugawa Kaoru, 1994); and co-edited (and contributed to), with Jay Winter: The Encyclopedia of Europe, 1789-1914 and The Encyclopedia of Europe, 1914-2006, (each 5 volumes, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006).