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John Shovlin's Teaching and Research Interests

Research Interests:

I am a historian of eighteenth-century Europe with a special interest in the political and cultural history of the old régime and the French Revolution. I am currently finishing a book on political economy in eighteenth-century France that concentrates not on the well-trodden terrain of Enlightenment economic thought but on a corpus of several thousand texts written by largely forgotten authors. I argue that political economy articulated fundamental struggles in eighteenth-century society, and that a study of its broad contours can illuminate the origins of the French Revolution, and permit historians to think anew about how that upheaval articulated with its social and economic context. To an extent unacknowledged by historians, I suggest, the roots of 1789 lay in a rejection of the economic and social structures of the old regime. Beyond its role in political life, massive public engagement with problems of economic order mediated a cultural transformation of enduring significance-the emergence of a new awareness that economic activity constituted a fundamental ground of human relations, a basic source of order in human communities. In my published work, I have explored aspects of noble culture, the luxury debate, and discourses concerning honor in old regime and revolutionary France. My next book project, which will operate at the intersection between cultural history and the history of international conflict, will explore the origins of warfare in eighteenth-century Europe.

My teaching interests focus on the French Revolution, on eighteenth-century French politics and culture, and on the history of European social, economic, and political thought. In coming years I plan to teach courses on the Enlightenment in comparative European perspective, on the political, social, and cultural history of ancien régime France, on war and international conflict in early modern Europe, and on the French Revolution.

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