Established in 1808 by Napoleon, the Ordre des Palmes Académiques is one of the oldest civil honours bestowed by the French State and is conferred on distinguished academics in recognition of their significant contribution to scholarship and teaching in their field.
In a letter accompanying the award, The French Ambassador to the UK, Mme Catherine Colonna, congratulated Dr McCallam on his exemplary engagement in promoting French language and Francophone culture, particularly in his specialist fields of the literature of the Revolutionary period and environmental history in eighteenth-century France and Europe.
An awards ceremony will take place later in the year.
Dr McCallam is currently on leave from the University and is in France, as the recipient of a prized Camargo Foundation Research Fellowship (Core Program), where he is studying various social and ecological perspectives on the great plague of Marseille of 1720, including the building of the so-called 'Plague Wall' in Vaucluse (see image above).
