Rebecca Scales Headshot

Rebecca Scales

Associate Professor

Department of History
College of Liberal Arts
History BS Program Director
rpsgsh@rit.edu
585-475-4244
Office Hours
Schedule a meeting with Prof. Scales here: https://calendly.com/rpsgsh.
Office Location
LBR-3118

Rebecca Scales

Associate Professor

Department of History
College of Liberal Arts
History BS Program Director

Education

BA, Hollins College; MA, University of Georgia; Ph.D., Rutgers University

Bio

I am historian of twentieth-century Europe and my research focuses on the social and cultural history of France.  My first book, Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939 (Cambridge, 2016, 2018) examined the democratization of radio in France, uncovering how how broadcasting became a new platform for political engagement by transforming the act of listening into an important, if highly contested, practice of citizenship. My research on radio broadcasting in France and its empire has also appeared in French Historical Studies; French History; French Politics, Culture, and Society; Media History; and Comparative Studies in Society and History. 

Since completing my first book, I have continued researching global radio history, co-authoring a recent history of international broadcasting entitled Wireless World: Global Histories of International Broadcasting (Oxford, 2022). In the summer of 2021, I co-directed an National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for higher education faculty entitled "Radio and Decolonization: Bringing Sound into Twentieth-Century History" with Andrea Stanton (Univ. of Denver) and Alejandra Bronfman (SUNY-Albany). We are continuing this project by organizing an NEH-funded conference on radio and decolonization in July 2024. 

With support from the NEH, I have begun a new book project entitled Polio and its Afterlives:  Disability and Disease in Twentieth Century France. Weaving together histories of epidemic disease, public health, and medicine with the social and cultural history of disability, this interdisciplinary book examines how polio transformed France’s welfare state and health care systems, fueled vaccine development and biomedical research, and mediated France’s geopolitical status during an era of decolonization and rising American predominance. 

My research has been supported by national and international grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Embassy of France in the United States, the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones d’Amérique. 

At RIT, I teach courses about twentieth-century Europe, imperialism, the world wars, urban history, the history of travel and tourism, and the history of science, technology, and medicine. I'm particularly excited to be developing a new course, “The Global History of Epidemics,” which will be offered in spring 2026.

rpsgsh@rit.edu
585-475-4244
Personal Links
Google Scholar
Areas of Expertise
European history and cultures
France and French cultures
Imperialism
Postcolonialism
Media history
Disability history
History of science, technology and medicine

Select Scholarship

Books

  • Wireless World: International Broadcasting in the Twentieth Century, co-authored with Simon Potter, David Clayton, Friedrike Kind-Kovacs, Vincent Kuitenbrower, Nelson Ribiero, Andrea Stanton. Oxford University Press, 2022 (hardback).
  • Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939. Cambridge University Press, 2016 (hardback, e-book), 2018 (paperback).**Honorable Mention, Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies, 2016-17**

Articles & Book Chapters

  • “La politique familiale de la Colonie de Saint-Fargeau,” in Histoires des handicaps et des singularités à travers les siècles. Identifications, Institutions, trajectoires, sociabilités, ed. Fabrice Bertin, Gildas Brégain, and Ninon Dubourg. Presses universitaires de Rennes, forthcoming, 2024.
  • “Roundtable: Disability History in France: Past, Present, and Future,” trans. & ed. Rebecca P. Scales, Jérôme Bas, Gildas Brégain, Jonathyne Briggs, Jessie Hewitt, Catherine Kudlick, and Sun-Young Park, French History, 38:1 (March 2024), 139-163.
  • “Inventing Polio Care at the Colonie de Saint-Fargeau: Disability, Rehabilitation, and the Welfare State in Interwar France, The Journal of Social History, 57:4 (Summer 2024), 520-549.
  • “La Tribune de l’Invalide: Radio Broadcasting, Disability Activism, and the Remaking of the French Welfare State,” French Politics, Culture, and Society, 37, No. 3 (Winter 2019), 53-78.
  • “Jacques Lusseyran et l’étranger: regards sur l’Amérique” in Jacques Lusseyran: entre cécité et lumière (Jacques Lusseyran Between Blindness and Light), ed. Marion Chottin, Céline Roussel, and Zina Weygand. Paris: Éditions rue de l’Ulm, Presses de l’École normale supérieure, 2019, 87-104.
  • “Métissage on the Airwaves: Towards a Cultural History of Broadcasting in French Colonial Algeria, 1930-1935,” Media History, 19, no. 3 (2013): 305-321.
  • “Subversive Sound: Transnational Radio, Arabic Recordings, and the Dangers of Listening in French Colonial Algeria 1934-1939,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52, no. 2 (2010): 384-417.
  • “Radio Broadcasting, Disabled Veterans, and Politics of National Recovery in Interwar France, 1928-1935,” French Historical Studies, 31, no. 4 (2008): 643-678.

Recent Invited Talks and Seminars

  • “Inventing Polio Care at the Colonie de Saint-Fargeau: Disability and the Welfare State in Interwar France,” Department of History, York University (UK), April 27, 2022. 
  • “Inventing Polio Care at the Colonie de Saint-Fargeau: Disability and the Welfare State in Interwar France,” Department of History, Bristol University, November 24, 2021.
  • “Looking for Listeners in the Archives: Radio Broadcasting and Subversive Sounds in Colonial Algeria,” Series on Musical Encounters Across the Strait of Gibraltar, Cambridge University, May 20, 2021. (online)
  • Book Presentation, Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities, Princeton University, April 5, 2021. (online)

Currently Teaching

HIST-170
Twentieth Century Europe
3 Credits
This course examines major themes and controversies in European history from 1900 to the present, placing particular emphasis on the early 20th century crisis of liberal democracy and the political alternatives proposed to parliamentary government: right-wing nationalism, communism, and fascism. Topics will include: the impact of World War I on European societies and politics; Popular Front movements in France and Spain; eugenics and the Nazi racial state; the Holocaust; occupation and resistance during World War II; decolonization; student rebellions in 1968; Cold War domestic politics; and the reshaping of post-communist and post-colonial Europe. Special attention will be placed racial politics and immigration, state surveillance regimes, and European debates over the Americanization and globalization of European cultures.
HIST-275
Screening the Trenches: The History of WWI Through Film
3 Credits
This course uses popular films to examine World War I as the global conflict that set the stage for the rise of communism, fascism, and subsequent wars in twentieth-century Europe. Students will gain an understanding of the major causes and outcomes of World War I while investigating how the war transformed class, gender, and racial politics in Europe. Special attention will be paid to the combat/trench experience, the home front/war front divide, the German occupation of Belgium and Northern France, “total war,” the politics of shell-shock and disability, and the legacies of grief, mourning, and commemoration. Because World War I so greatly divided its participants, little consensus about the war’s meaning emerged in its aftermath. Filmmakers have consequently used World War I as a blank slate on which to project political fantasies, condemn elements of their own societies, or imagine the future. Students will use secondary historical literature and original primary sources to analyze filmic representations of World War I and consider how filmmakers have deliberately misrepresented the past or constructed particular narratives about the war to serve their own ends. This course will therefore equip students to think critically about representations of the historical past in popular culture.
HIST-391
France Under Nazi Occupation: Collaboration & Resistance in WWII
3 Credits
In the summer of 1940, as Nazi tanks rolled into France, the government fled Paris and decided to sign an Armistice. France’s collapse led to the formation of the far-right Vichy regime, which openly collaborated with the Nazi occupiers by providing labor, industrial goods, and natural resources. Students in this course will examine historical debates surrounding this controversial period, from France’s military collapse in 1940 to evolving definitions of “collaboration” and “occupation,” while examining the complex moral and ethical decisions made by French people living under Nazi rule. Did good French citizens owe loyalty to the Vichy regime or did maintaining one’s commitment to the French Republic require engagement in resistance activity? Did people have a moral obligation to aid populations persecuted by the Vichy regime or the Germans? Moving from mainland France to London, the Channel Islands, North and West Africa, and Eastern Europe, this class will consider how the Nazi Occupation of France resonated around the globe, as well as its impact on the everyday lives of women, children, ethnic minorities (Jews/Roma), refugees, disabled people, LGBTQ people, and colonial subjects. Students will evaluate the moral, ethical, and political considerations that motivated people to join Resistance organizations, from communist sympathizers to Charles de Gaulle’s Free French, as well as their role in the Liberation of France and postwar reconstruction. The class will consider how the war affected France’s geopolitical status as well as its relationship with other European countries, North and West Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Finally, the class will interrogate how the memory of wartime collaboration (and particularly France’s role in the Holocaust) remained divisive into the post-WWII period, shaping debates about decolonization, immigration, and racism into the late twentieth century. Students will learn to evaluate historical arguments as well as interpret primary historical sources (books, memoirs, newspapers, government documents, photographs, radio broadcasts, and films).

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