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2004-2005 Fellows

2004-2005 Fellow Shaya

Greg Shaya

College of Wooster
Department of History

Greg Shaya is an assistant professor of history at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, where he has taught since 2001. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan. He is completing a book manuscript, Mayhem for Moderns: Sensationalism and Public Emotion in France, c. 1900, which examines the cultural forms and political functions of the reporting of crime and catastrophe in the burgeoning mass press of France at the turn of the twentieth century. His current research project explores the publicity of execution in nineteenth and twentieth-century France.

Project Summary

For his project, "Revisiting the Spectacle of the Scaffold: The Public Execution in france, 1800-1939," Shaya's central research questions are these: Why did the public execution last so much later in France than in the rest of Western Europe? And what should we take from these portraits of the execution crowd? What do they say about broader anxieties regarding the public? He approaches these questions through a series of sources: parliamentary debates, the reporting of public execution and the crowd in the press, execution songs and broadsides, literary accounts and police memoirs of executions, the recommendations of jurists and criminal anthropologists, photographs and films of real and imagined executions, and the extensive state archives on capital punishment. Shaya aims to examine these sources from the early nineteenth-century reforms of public punishment (in 1832) down to the privatization of the execution (in 1939) in order to explain the significance of the public execution and the public execution debate to French politics and culture.