Institute Newsletters

2016-2017

Tallahassee, April, 20, 2017

 

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I write to share with you news of the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution during the 2016-2017 academic year.

 

Weider Professorship in the French Revolutionary History

      I am thrilled to announce that the INFR has a new professor of French Revolutionary history: Dr. Cathy McClive.  Dr McClive received her Ph.D. from the University of Warwick in England in 2004. She held a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellowship at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, before taking up a lectureship and then senior lectureship at Durham University in 2005. She co-edited Femmes en Fleurs: Femmes en Corps. Sang, Santé et Sexualités du Moyen Âge aux Lumières with Professor Nicole Pellegrin in 2010. Her monograph, Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France was published by Ashgate in 2015. Dr. McClive has published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Social History of Medicine, History Workshop Journal, Annales de Demographie Historique and the journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Her research has been supported by the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Fondation, Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and she held a junior EURIAS (Marie Curie co-funded Seventh framework European Union programme) fellowship at the Collegium de Lyon, 2011-2012. Dr. McClive accepted the Weider Professorship in January 2017. She will be teaching courses on sexuality, gender, the body, and medical expertise during the Revolutionary Era.  

 

New Position in French Revolutionary History

     Another new colleague in French Revolutionary history will be joining us this fall: Dr. Elizabeth Cross. Dr. Cross received her Ph.D. in May 2017 from Harvard University.  Her dissertation, “The French East India Company and the Politics of Commerce in the Revolutionary Era,” focuses on the politics involved in transforming the Company from a state-affiliated enterprise into a purely private business.  She has also published an article in French History and a chapter in Vertu et politique: les pratiques des législateurs (1789-2014) with the Presses Universitaires de Rennes.  Her research has been supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Newberry Library, and the Minda de Guzberg Center for European Studies.

 

Graduate Degrees Awarded

            One INFR student received her doctorate this year.

  • Tarah Luke, “Our Bonaparte: Republicanism, Religion, and Paranoia in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, 1789-1830”

 

Graduate Student Conference Participation

     This was a very busy year for the INFR graduate students on the conference circuit.  Altogether, they presented 14 papers at a variety of conferences in the U.S. and abroad.

  • Arad Gigi, “The Materiality of Empire : State, Colonists, and Slaves in the Iles du Vent, 1660s-1760s,” Laboratoire AHIP-GEODE, Université des Antilles, Fort-de-France, Martinique (2017) 
  • -----, “The Ancien Régime’s Plantation Complex: Labor and the Colonial State in Martinique, 1660-1776,” French Colonial Historical Society, Aix-en-Provence (2017).
  • -----, “Coastal Defenses and Creole-Metropolitan Relations in Old Régime Martinique.” American Historical Association, Denver (2017).
  • -----, “Defending an Empire, Building the State, Constructing Colonial Spaces: The History of Fort Royal, Martinique, 1660-1756.” European Early American Studies Association, Paris (2016) 
  • -----, “The Slaves who built the King’s Empire: Labor for the Construction of Fortifications in the Iles du Vent during the Old Regime.” Omohundro Institute Annual Conference, Worcester, MA (2016).
  • Benjamin Goff, "The Milice of Eighteenth-Century France," Society for Military History, Jacksonville (2017)
  • -----, “Militias in Late Eighteenth-Century France: Professionalizing Reforms and the Revolution,” Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, Charleston (2017)
  • Chris Juergens, "Military Reform and Education in Hessen-Kassel, 1760-1785,” Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, Charleston (2017)
  • -----, "German Auxiliaries in British Grand Strategy during the American War of Independence,” Society for Military History, Jacksonville (2017)
  • Richard Siegler, “The Fall and Rise of Octrois: Restoring an Old Regime Tax in Revolutionary France, 1791-1800,” Society for French Historical Studies, Washington D.C. (2017)
  • -----, “An Old Regime Tax in Napoleonic France: Octrois and Municipal Finances, 1798-1815,” Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, Charleston (2017)
  • Erik Lewis, “Boarding School and Building an Empire: Napoleon and the Maisons d’Education de la Legion d’Honneur,” Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, Charleston (2017)
  • Zachary Stolzfus, "A Moveable Beast: The French Revolution and the Reclassification of Property," Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, Charleston (2017)
  • Marina Ortiz, “The Art of War”: Cultural Commemoration of the Napoleonic Military,” Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, Charleston (2017)
  • Joseph Harmon, “The Revolutionary Nationalization of the Church,” Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, Charleston (2017)

 

Graduate Student Awards and Fellowships

     The graduate students also garnered a number of honors, awards, and fellowships.

  • Arad Gigi, Martin Vegue Dissertation Fellowship (2016)
  • -----, Graduate School International Dissertation Research Fellowship (2017)
  • -----, Short-Term Research Fellowship, John Carter Brown Library (2017)
  • Richard Siegler, Fondation Napoleon Dissertation Research Fellowship (2017)
  • -----, Massena Society Dissertation Research Fellowship (2017)
  • -----, J. Leitch Wright Jr. Award for Outstanding Research (2016)
  • Joseph Harmon, Massena Society Dissertation Research Fellowship (2017)

 

Graduate Student Publications

  • Richard Siegler, “A Motion for Heredity: Contextualizing Le Moniteur’s Role in the Creation of the Empire, February-May 1804,” Napoleonic Scholarship: The Journal of the International Napoleonic Society, No. 7, December 2016
  • Zachary Stolzfus, "Napoleon's Kindle: Libraries, Literature, and the Legacy of the Napoleonic Era, Napoleonic Scholarship: The Journal of the International Napoleonic Society, No.7, December 2016.

 

Graduate Student Archival Research

  • In Fall 2016 Arad Gigi conducted dissertation research in Paris at the Archives Nationales and the Archives des Affaires Etrangeres.  In January 2017, he conducted further archival research in the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island.  Finally, in February-April 2017 he travelled to both Martinique and Guadeloupe, where he conducted further research in the archives of those departements.  He is now writing up his dissertation on French military fortification and defense policy in the Caribbean.

 

New INFR Students

     In the 2017-2018, there will be 2 new students joining the INFR.  They are:

  • Derek Ferguson (MA), coming from the University of Florida
  • Adam Hunt (MA), coming from the University of North Florida

 

Weider History Series

     Since 2014 the Weider Foundation has been making generous donations to fund the annual Weider History Conference.  This year’s conference, the 3rd in the series, focused on “Sex and Gender in France, 1780-1870.”  It opened with keynote speeches by Professor Jeffrey Merrick (University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee) and Professor Julie Hardwick (University of Texas – Austin).

      The conference itself showcased the work of nine early-career scholars who presented draft articles and book chapters on various aspects of the conference theme.  These were commented upon by invited senior scholars from various universities in America, France, and the United Kingdom.

     A particular highlight was the participation of two FSU alumni, Dr. Susan Conner and Dr. Charles Mackay, who travelled from Michigan and Georgia, respectively, to attend.

 

Activities of Some Recent Institute Alumni

  • Bryan Banks (Ph.D. FSU 2014) is a tenure-track assistant professor at SUNY – Adirondack.  His article “Real and Imaginary Friends in Revolutionary France: Quakers, Political Culture, and the Atlantic World” has been accepted for publication by Eighteenth Century Studies and will appear later this year.  He is also co-founder, co-editor, and contributor (with Cindy Ermus) of the Age of Revolutions blog.
  • Cindy Ermus (Ph.D. FSU 2014) is a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Lethbridge (Canada).  Her article, “The Spanish Plague that Never Was: Crisis and Exploitation in Cadiz during the Plague of Provence,” was published in Eighteenth Century Studies in 2016.  Her edited volume, Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South: Two Centuries of Catastrophe, Risk, and Resilience will be published by the LSU Press later in 2017.  She is also co-founder, co-editor, and contributor (with Bryan Banks) of the Age of Revolutions blog.
  • Erica Johnson (Ph.D. FSU 2012) is moving from her tenure-track assistant professorship at Gordon State University to a new tenure-track position at Francis Marion University.
  • Joshua Meeks (Ph.D. FSU 2014) is a tenure-track assistant professor at Northwest University.  His book, France, Britain, and the Struggle for the Revolutionary Western Mediterranean was published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2017.

 

Activities of the Institute Professors

     In March 2017, Dr. Rafe Blaufarb published The Revolutionary Atlantic: Republican Visions, 1760-1830: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press).  Also in 2017, his The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (Oxford University Press) was named a Choice Magazine “outstanding publication,” an honor reserved for the top 3% of academic books published each year.  He also gave a number of conference papers and lectures, including the keynote speech opening the annual meeting of the Society for Military History.

 

Thank you for your continuing support.

Sincerely,

Rafe Blaufarb, Ben Weider Eminent Scholar

-Director, Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution

 

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2015-2016