I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in “scientific” studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category “race,” despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as “races” groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a “race?” Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the “metalanguage” of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

A profound sentiment of satisfaction might settle upon Herrick Chapman after he reads the articles in this special issue. For having touched so many lives, for having excelled in the intellectual endeavors he set out to explore, and for having made an impact on the field of French Studies itself, any soul would be rightly moved to a sense of completion and contentedness that accompanies such lifetime achievement. Teaching, research, and service are the core responsibilities of all tenure-stream academics, but Chapman has fulfilled these missions to an extraordinary degree to which few can aspire. In addition to this triple crown, his career is matched by a life well lived, one in which family, friendship, joy, and love are so abundant that they infuse his professionalism.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.