Universal Expositions: Behind the Scenes and Beyond the Fairgrounds (Response Essay)

ABSTRACT

This essay comments on the articles collected for this special issue about international expositions in France. It finds four major themes for new directions in exposition studies. First is the long literary and cultural shadow of expositions, or the shifting timescales that gave these temporary events lasting legacies. Second are the (often unintended) concrete consequences and costs for host cities of expositions understood as mega-events and mega-projects. Third is the inverse or obverse of ‘display’, those things that expositions conceal or hide. Fourth are the ways that expositions shaped and were shaped by the world beyond their gates.

KEYWORDS:

• Expositions
• France
• infrastructure
• media
• mega-events
• modernity
• nineteenth century

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note on the contributor

Peter Soppelsa is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma. He was managing editor of Technology and Culture from 2010 to 2020, and is the editor, with Suzanne Moon, of History of Technology: Critical Readings, 4 vols. (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Notes

1 These methodological trends continue in recent studies of twentieth-century expositions; see for example: Kargon et al. (2015), Mollela and Knowles (2019).

2 For an in-depth look at the Vieux Paris, see Emery (2005).

3 For more recent research on women’s agency and labour in expositions, see: Rogers and Boussahba-Bravard (2019).