Searching for Nostradamus

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“Who was he? And more to the point, what is he to us?”

French historian Stéphane Gerson considers these questions in a fascinating analysis of visual representations of Nostradamus over the past 500 years.

Stéphane Gerson is a professor of French, French Studies, and History at New York University and director of the Institute of French Studies. Gerson is the author of The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in 19th-Century France (Cornell University Press, 2003), which won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History and the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies. His recent publications include Nostradamus: How an Obscure French Doctor Became the Modern Prophet of Doom (St. Martin’s Press, 2012), “Remembering and Forgetting” (Bloomsbury, 2020), and “Tentatives de cambriolage, troubles d’historien” (CNRS Editions, 2022).