In conjunction with The Orleans Collection exhibition, historian Joan DeJean will present a lecture titled “Champs-Elysées: Building Paris, Building New Orleans.” Read more about the lecture’s theme in this interview with Dr. DeJean.

Joan DeJean has been Trustee Professor at the University of Pennsylvania since 1988. She previously taught at Yale and at Princeton. She is the author of eleven books on French literature, history, and material culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including most recently The Queen’s Embroiderer: A True Story of Lovers, Swindlers, and the First Stock Market Crisis (2018); The Invention of Paris: Making the City Modern (2014); The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual and the Modern Home Began (2009); and The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour (2005).