Kelly Summers Assistant Professor in the Humanities, MacEwan University (Edmonton) Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: November 2023 Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: »Emigration and Re-migration during the French Revolution« Project outline: My book project, titled The Great Return: Émigrés, Refugees, and Revolution in France, 1789–1815, charts the complete life cycle of emigration, refuge, and re-migration across the momentous quarter-century that birthed modern politics. French efforts to police residency influenced the domestic and foreign policies of every government that held power between the fall of the Bastille and the Bourbon Restoration. The Revolution and its attendant wars dispersed unprecedented numbers of soldiers and civilians—many of whom, rightly or wrongly, were classified as counter-revolutionary émigrés and banished in perpetuity on pain of death. By means both legal and otherwise, however, the vast majority managed to return home within a decade of their departures. This wholescale repatriation—the speed and scale of which distinguishes émigrés from their Huguenot, Jacobite, and Loyalist predecessors—was neither smooth nor inevitable. This was evidenced by the twists and turns of the so-called Calais Affair, a cause célèbre involving a regiment of shipwrecked émigrés that will be the focus of my time at the FKH. In chronicling how the French nation vacillated between banishing and reintegrating the 150 000 citizens who fled during the revolutionary era, my research contributes to an interdisciplinary body of scholarship dedicated to voluntary and forced migration, political reconciliation, the rights and duties of citizenship, and the politics of exile and asylum. (Kelly Summers) Research partner: Kelly Summers was invited by Frederike Middelhoff, Professor of modern German literature with a focus on Romanticism at Goethe University Frankfurt and Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften. Her stay is supported by Middelhoff’s Goethe Fellow Project »Romanticism and Migration. A history of knowledge«. Scholarly profile of Kelly SummersKelly Summers is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2015. Her scholarship focuses on voluntary and forced migration, the mechanisms and challenges of post-revolutionary reconciliation, tensions between the rights and duties of citizenship, and the politics of exile and asylum.Website: Main areas of research: Age of Revolutions, transnational emigration and re-migration, refugee studies, mercenary regiments, legal history, political reconciliation, gender and the lawSelected publications:
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