Suzanne Marchand

Suzanne Marchand (Ph.D.,  University of Chicago) is the Boyd Professor of European Intellectual History at Louisiana State University. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, the Max Planck Institute, and Harvard's Villa I Tatti. She is the author of Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1870 (Princeton University Press, 1996) and German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Race, Religion, and Scholarship  (Cambridge University Press, 2009). 

The title of one of your essays asks the question "How Much Knowledge is Worth Knowing?" I think you are using "worth" figuratively, but I wonder, how much does economics play a role in the topics you study, whetherit's the "antiquities rush" of the 19th century or the history of porcelein, to take two examples from your current interests?

Interesting question!  This essay is about a new field of study known as "the history of knowledge," which considers the history of knowledge production very broadly, treating such as things as the knowledge of how to raise chickens, or how to fit saddles, or how to mix paints and mend clocks.  The contrast here is to histories of elite knowledge, such as the history of philosophy or the history of physics, as pursed largely by white, elite men (as women and non-white persons were typically excluded from these realms).  I am very interested in knowledge production generally, and I am in favor of democratizing our inquiries.  But I am a bit worried that we will get too local or even arcane in our pursuits, and take on studies such as the history of chicken raising in the 1830s in Prussia, without considering why that knowledge mattered or what its more general importance might be.  Perhaps it would be better to treat this material as social history, and place it in the context not of knowledge production, but of the history of the Prussian rural labor force, where a better case might be made for its importance.  In any event, by the "worth" of knowledge here I did not mean its economic value, but its scholarly worth: and it seems to me necessary that scholars make a good case for the importance of their studies, beyond the merely anecdotal or antiquarian interest they might have.

Much of your work focuses on Herodotus. What in your opinion is the most interesting work of art that depicts either Herodotus himself or an episode from his History? 

I would say it is a J. J. Rubens painting of Queen Tomyris, which dates to about 1630. 

Tomyris in The Histories is the queen of the Massagetae; after her son is tricked into captivity and suicide by the army of the Persian king Cyrus, Tomyris makes sure her warriors go after Cyrus. Once they have killed him, they send her his head, and as she dips it into a wineskin of human blood, she declares: "I give you your fill of blood!" Herodotus' account is the only extant one of this scene, and many thought it was not historically accurate. (Xenophon had a wholly different story about Cyrus' death.). But it was a favorite artistic subject, and Louis XIV even put this painting in his throne room, apparently to associate himself with Tomyris and her cool determination to revenge herself on enemies of her state and family, no matter how exalted.

You are a modern historian, but much of your work deals with ancient history. Which classicist has had the biggest influence on your own scholarship?

I would say that my fascination with the subject of the ancient world goes back to a trip my sister and I took with our parents to Greece and Italy in 1981, when I was 19 and she was 16. She became a classicist (archaeologist) and definitely of all living classicists she has had the biggest impact on me! In addition, I attended a terrific lecture series on the work of Heinrich Schliemann at Troy by the British classicist Anthony Snodgrass when I was in college, and that intrigued me greatly. Since that time, I have never stopped learning from classicists, and from Near Eastern specialists, religious studies scholars, art historians, archaeologists, and museum curators. One of my friends says of the university that it is intended to contain knowledge of the universe, past and present; and I say: learn from all!