Since 1995, Guillaume de Syon has been teaching history at Albright College (Reading, Pennsylvania, United States). He is spending his 2018-2019 sabbatical year in Paris, where he is one of the visiting researchers at LATTS.
Trained in contemporary history (PhD Boston University 1994), he specializes in contemporary German history and the history of science and technology.
In this field, he has published Zeppelin! Germany and the Airship 1900-1939 (Johns Hopkins 2002) and Science and Technology in Modern European Life (Greenwood, 2008). He also contributed to the publication of the eighth volume of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (Princeton, 1998), which deals with the physicist's correspondence during the First World War.
His research focuses on aviation and technical culture as expressed in popular media such as postcards, comic strips, and the press.
His current project concerns the role of advertising in the expansion of air transport, which he analyzes as part of the broadening of certain popular knowledge of aviation. In his history of railways, German historian of mentalities Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes the phenomenon of "travel pathology." Mr. de Syon draws on this typology to explain that for many years, the notion of flying provoked a reaction of opposition based not only on a fear of heights, echoing the legend of Icarus, but also on a lack of understanding of the value of air transport and the mobility it offered.
This analysis project therefore seeks to clarify the intersection between the visual culture of commercial aviation, its technical progress as reflected therein, so-called marketing tools, and the political value of the enterprise. Whether selling a new commercial route or representing a country, aviation advertising ultimately becomes part of printed "Alltagsgeschichte" (everyday history).
A complete CV and selected publications can be downloaded at http://albright.academia.edu/GuillaumedeSyon.