In 2014, I was in my final year of college at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, presenting a paper to a seminar on modern French history. The regular professor was away; a visiting instructor had come in as a replacement. I had barely outlined my argument when the instructor started to pull the rug out from under me. The interruptions began: a sentence in, then another. Each point I tried to make was seized, reframed or dismantled before I could finish. The discussion moved quickly and confidently — entirely away from me. When the session ended, I walked out feeling something I can only describe as intellectual erasure: the sense that I had stood up to speak and had somehow not been allowed to exist. A few of my fellow students came up to me afterward, visibly shocked by what had happened. Their reactions created a moment of solidarity in the hallway — the quiet recognition that something in the room had gone wrong. If you have presented your work in a course and walked out feeling smaller than when you walked in, you are not misremembering.

I wrote immediately to a mentor. His reply was short: “Hard lesson in life,” he wrote. “I don’t even know his name. Move on.” What I didn’t understand then — and only began to understand once I started teaching my own seminars — is that “move on” is not actually available to everyone. “Move on” is advice most students receive, and most quietly cannot follow. Some moments don’t move on. They stay in the room with you, long after the room itself has disappeared.

There is a French pedagogical tradition called “la reprise” — the........

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