Nicole Eustace's Teaching and Research InterestsResearch Interests:
My work focuses on issues of family, gender, and politics in eighteenth-century North America. I am particularly interested the study of social communication and am currently revising a manuscript called "Passion Is the Gale: Emotion and Power on the Eve of the American Revolution." Building on work by previous scholars that has documented the prominence of emotion in eighteenth-century European religion and philosophy, this project explores the remarkable rise of popular and political interest in emotion in early America. Analysis of the language of emotion employed in everything from private letters to political pamphlets (and used by and about everyone from colonial magistrates to patriot leaders, from servants and slaves to masters and mistresses, and from European settlers to Native Americans) leads me to argue that the expression of emotion was key to the communication and negotiation of status in colonial British America. Ultimately, the language of emotion provided the basis for a new
Revolutionary political vocabulary. Future projects will continue my exploration of the myriad intersections between the personal and the political in eighteenth-century North America, including a study of eighteenth-century Anglo-American interest in--and anxiety about--marriage as a model for politics.
Teaching Interests:
My teaching focuses on North American colonialism and on the comparative study of society and culture in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. This fall, I will offer two courses: a section of the U.S. survey with special emphasis on themes of land and labor, family and politics, religion and culture among the African, European, and Native American peoples who encountered each other in North America and created the United States; and a seminar for history majors called, "Family, State, and Society in the Early Modern Atlantic," which will compare the varied systems of family and political organization (and explore the connections between them) that characterized North American societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Attention will be paid to the practices of English, French, and Spanish colonial societies, as well as the contributing and conflicting influences of constitutive African, European, and Native American societies. Future offerings will include survey courses on the colonial and revolutionary periods of US history as well as comparative courses (on both the graduate and undergraduate levels) on eighteenth-century political culture and cultural power, Enlightenment religion and philosophy, as well as gender and the family in the Atlantic World.
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