I am a historian of eighteenth-century France and the Carl E. Koch Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. My book, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, integrates politics, economics, and gender to ask how Parisian market women, called the Dames des Halles, invented notions of citizenship through their everyday trade. Winner of the 2020 Louis Gottschalk Prize and Finalist for the Berkshire Conference First Book Award, this book analyzes how marketplace actors shaped nascent democracy and capitalism and, in doing so, challenges the idea that the French Revolution launched an inherently masculine trajectory for modern citizenship. My current project, Democratizing Forgiveness in Revolutionary France, explores how the revolutionaries refashioned forgiveness through economic, judicial, gendered, and cultural venues from 1789 to 1799.
Image Copyright: Bibliothèque nationale de France Réserve FOL-VE-53 (G), Claude-Louis Desrais, “Le Marché des Innocents / dessiné d'après nature par Desrais,” Drawing in pencil, pen, and ink; 30.6 x 52.5 cm (1793).