Featured Scholar
Christopher Church
2005 - 2006 University Scholar
Mentor: Sheryl Kroen
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Christopher Church knows a lot about French libraries. He spent a semester library hopping in France as part of his work as a University Scholar.
Christopher decided that since he would be studying abroad in France for a semester, he would take advantage of the time to do research.
“I worked a lot with Dr. Kroen and she told me about the study abroad program. It just seemed a logical step to participate in the USP while I was there,” he said. “The most interesting thing about my experience as a University Scholar was the experience of getting to live in Paris.” Christopher studied in Paris through the Honors Program.
As an English and history major with a minor in French, Christopher was well up to the task of diving into a research project. “I had done a full thesis for history and through that had become interested in the gangrene affair in France,” he said. “I was very interested in it, but couldn’t devote a lot of time to it because of the scope of the project I was doing. I was rooting around and kept hearing gangrene, gangrene and I’d never heard of it. In doing my research I found many moments suppressed during the Algerian War.”
According to Christopher’s research, “Amidst the Algerian War, a story of torture shook the French nation, provoking a public outrage and inducing a heated debate in the press. Seven Algerians, five students and two businessmen, were taken by the police from their Parisian homes as possible members of the Algerian insurgency. These seven were then tortured at Fresnes Prison in Paris before being released; no charges were pressed. Two of the five students had to be hospitalized. The five students compiled their testimonies into a work entitled La Gangrène. As soon as the book hit the presses, a scandal was born. Thirty-thousand copies of La Gangrène sold out in only two days.”
A lot of luck was involved in Christopher’s research, because although the account of the gangrene affair in France was first published in 1960, no other details were ever recovered. “The fact that I was able to find so much information for my research was really a matter of coincidence,” Christopher said. “The Bibliotheque National in Paris had recently compiled all the newspapers from the Algerian War, so I could access those. It was a very new project, I was literally one of the first people to want to see the articles so I had to repeatedly convince the library staff that yes, they did have these articles, they were just compiled.”
Currently Christopher is working on his Masters in Social Science Education at the University of Florida. He eventually wants to get his Ph.D. in history and hopes to become a professor. But first, he wants to do something different. “I wanted to get into teaching for a while because I like to look at both sides,” Christopher said. “In doing research and writing you usually have to take a side, but in teaching you can be unbiased. I just love rambling on about history and want to be able to share my knowledge.”
-By Heather Read
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