Associate Professor Emerita, Anthropology
About
Janet Hart joined the University of Michigan faculty as an assistant professor of sociology and women’s studies in 1988 and was promoted to associate professor in 1995, when she joined the Anthropology Department. She retired from active faculty status in 2010 while pursuing research in Paris, France, where she was affiliated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and supported by a Fulbright Foundation Faculty Research grant.
Hart is the author of New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance, 1941-1964. Ithaca: Cornell University Press and the University of Chicago Wilder House Series in Politics, History and Culture, a study of political culture based, among other sources, on oral histories of the young women who took part in the resistance movement designed to both counter Nazi occupation and to establish universal suffrage and participation.
Janet Hart describes, often in the words of the Greek women involved, how lives were transformed by active participation in the resistance against the Nazis and in the anticommunist aftermath of the war. The author places the resistance movement in an international context by examining how the struggle to promote modern political culture (deemed "political modernism") among ordinary people and local leadership took shape on the ground in the course of the battle against conquering Axis forces and subsequently during the Greek Civil War (1946-49), when many former partisans served time as political prisoners in municipal jails and exile islands.
Oral histories collected in particular speak of forms of resistance and political cultures developed behind prison walls. Hart uses insights gleaned from former partisans, 19th and 20th century Greek and broader European figures, Italian leader and political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, and histories of black consciousness. An additional focus involves the myriad ways in which social movements, by challenging the political status quo, have ultimately found themselves targeted as threats to state equilibrium.
At the time of her retirement, Hart was pursuing a research project employing family histories of the Antillais, French citizens from the island départements of Martinique and Guadeloupe (as of 1948) repatriated to metropolitan France in significant numbers during the 1960s and 1970s. Broadly known as the BUMIDOM generation after the premier agency charged with organizing their passage, the Antillais have been compared to the Windrush generation in the U.K. Hart’s research involved the collecting of testimonies of family members of all ages, from those who had come to France with the first wave to subsequent generations born and raised in Paris. That project shared some epistemological and methodological ground with her earlier research in that it aimed to build new understandings by way of oral historical and narratological approaches in addition to available archival material, as well as an ethnographic commitment to “living among,” albeit in an urban context, which included classes in the créole language still spoken across generations.
In sum, Hart's research focused on cross-generational fieldwork among several extended families, using participant observation, family gatherings, individual meetings, oral histories, study of vocabulary and language ideological habits, living quarters, and bought or collected objects. She also investigated political prisons and prisoners, focusing in both populations on issues of nationalism and transnationalism. Hart taught undergraduate and graduate courses in sociology, women's studies and anthropology. She participated in a number of dissertation committees, both in anthropology and in a wide range of other disciplines, and was a dedicated student advisor. She was active in various faculty governance and advisory committees, including a stint as Graduate Chair of the Department and served on the University of Michigan Press Executive Board from 1998-2001. In 1995, Professor Hart was recognized by the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts with its Excellence in Education Award.
Hart resides in a village near Montpellier, France.
