Office: 212 I Spotts World Culture Building
Email: lia.paradis@sru.edu
Phone: (724) 738-2403
Fax: (724) 738-4762
Spring 2013 Semester Office Hours:
Tuesday/Thursday - 9:00 am-9:30 am and 1:30 pm-2:00 pm
Wednesday - 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Dr. Paradis grew up in Vancouver, B.C. but was a long-time New Yorker before she began teaching at SRU in 2007. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University and her B.A. from Hunter College CUNY.
Her research projects have been varied, but they always focus on questions of identity in late 19th and 20th Century Britain and its Empire. Her dissertation was entitled Return Ticket: The Anglo-Sudanese and the Negotiation of Identity, 1920-1965. In it, Dr. Paradis explored the experiences of colonial administrators and their familes as they returned to settle in Britain after careers in the imperial arena. She has expanded on this project in her first book, Return Ticket: Memory and Identity in Britain and the Sudan, 1920-1965, which also examines the expectations of individuals prior to their initial journey to the Sudan, and the strategies used to bridge the gap between their lived experiences in the Sudan and their metropolitan counterparts assumptions about what a colonial life entails. This manuscript is currently under review.
Future projects include writing the first scholarly history of the Voluntary Service Overseas organization. The VSO is the British equivalent of the Peace Corps but, in fact, predates it, having been formed in 1956, the same year as the Suez Crisis. This project will explore how middle-class men and women, who in previous generations would have led international lives within the framework of the Empire, reconfigure opportunities for overseas experiences and careers in the era of decolonization and after.
Publications include:
"Manly Displays: Exhibitions and the Revival of the Olympic Games" in J.A.
Mangan, ed. Olympic Aspirations: Realized and Unrealized (New York: Routledge Press, 2012).
"Manly Displays" first appeard as an article in a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 27, Nos. 16/18 (Nov-Dec, 2010).
" ’Change of Masters': The Sudan Government British Pensioners' Association and the Negotiation of Postcolonial Identities," in The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 7 Issue 2 (Summer 2006).
"Bringing it all Back Home: the Project of Return for the Anglo-Sudanese,
1940-1965," in Patrick Manning, ed. World History: Global and Local Interactions
(Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner, 2005).
Dr. Paradis lives with her husband in the North Hills of Pittsburgh during the
schol year and in Brooklyn, NY during the "off season."
Courses taught:
Undergraduate:
HIST 152 Rise of the Modern World
HIST 320 History of Women from 1750 to the Present
HIST 346 Rise of Imperial Britain
HIST 347 20th Century British Culture
HIST 404 Violence in Post-45 Europe
HIST 426 French Revolution and Napoleon
HIST 498 History and Film
Graduate:
HIST 616 Modern England: Modern Britain and Modern Britons
HIST 625 Women in History - Special Topics: Gender and Historiography
Seminar