The French Center of Excellence and Department of History will host a conversation between Bruno Cabanes, Professor and Donald & Mary Dunn Chair in Modern Military History, and Benjamin Hoffmann, College of Arts & Sciences Designated Professor of French & Francophone Literature on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 in Thompson Library, Multipurpose Room 165 from 4:30pm-6:00pm.
Recently published by Editions du Seuil in Paris, Bruno Cabanes's monograph (Les fantômes de l'île de Peleliu. Récit ) [The Ghosts of Peleliu Island] examines the questions of memory and identity on Peleliu Island, in Micronesia. Retracing the war experience of Eugene B. Sledge, a young Marine who fought on the island in the fall of 1944, Cabanes undertook several research trips to Palau between 2017 and 2023. In his book, he engages in a temporal excavation, exploring the island’s jungle and intricate cave networks, and reflecting on the traces, vestiges and memories of a ten-week battle. The island’s history unfolds as a palimpsest, layered with voyages of exploration, ethnographic investigations, and successive waves of Spanish, German and Japanese colonizations. Combining travel impressions, American, Japanese and Palauan personal testimonies, archival materials, and field research, his book offers a vivid and poetic rendering of Peleliu and reveals the island in all its historical and emotional complexity.
Reviews:
"Bruno Cabanes' The Ghosts of Peleliu is a defining work on so many levels: as the history of an ecological and moral disaster, as an anthropology of survival, as a refutation of the "good American war" and a prose poem that calls on all our senses. In incandescent writing, Cabanes lets us hear the shrieking birds that haunted the Marines and the Japanese soldiers in battle and take stock of what little remains: an abandoned phosphate plant, a rusty Sherman tank, and a cave where the Americans entombed the last defenders of the island. This original and devastating book will be a classic.” - Alice Kaplan, Sterling Professor of French, Yale University
“What Cabanes has done here: a blend of history, biography, and on-the-scene reportage,is a model for how to bring the past alive." - Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost
“In this entrancing, gorgeously written book, Bruno Cabanes tells the story of his encounter with an island that experienced some of the most brutal combat in the Pacific theater of World War II. Retracing the steps of an American marine, Eugene Sledge, who fought there and later wrote a memoir of his experiences, Cabanes has put together an unforgettable combination of travel writing, history writing, and sober meditations on the distance between past and present, and on the nature of memory and forgetting.” - David A. Bell, Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of History, Princeton University
With a military historian’s acumen and deep knowledge of Pacific history, Bruno Cabanes explores how brutality and racism scarred individual lives, devastated local communities, and remade landscapes. Combining rich and varied research with personal travelogue, Les Fantômes de l’Île de Peleliu ultimately ruminates on the challenges of writing histories shaped by trauma – what is remembered, forgotten, and left unspoken. - J.P. Daughton, Professor of History, Stanford University
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History and French Center of Excellence, which receives funding from the French Cultural Services in the United States and the Consulate General of France in Chicago.
In December of 2020, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States selected the Department of French and Italian at The Ohio State University to join its prestigious network of Centers of Excellence. OSU’s Center of Excellence has the goal of promoting French and Francophone culture in the Midwest and beyond.
