The idea is to provide opportunity for students to choose from a wide variety of fields of investigation, although this often stretches my expertise to what I have read and discusssed, rather than what I have written about. I place particular emphasis on the development of skills, thinking that the best service I can provide is to help students work on their abilities to collect information, examine subjects critically, and present their ideas in writing or verbally. As an historian, I especially like the variety of history and the endless opportunities it provides for thinking about whatever you or I think is important or interesting. I am principally interested in French political history between 1789 and 1848, particularly democratisation, revolutionary versus reform tradition, and Bonapartism. Basically a lecture course, but a series of seminars on historical sources and methods is included.
Format consists of a roughly equal mix of seminars and lectures.
Emphasis falls on seminars, although lectures are provided by way of general background. Format consists of a roughly equal mix of seminars and lectures. To this point I have taught a graduate-level course on the historigoraphy of the French Revolution. Future courses depend on the interests and needs of students who enter the graduate programme and my own levels of expertise in early-modern and modern French history. In the past year I have had the pleasure, as supervisor, of watching two M.A. students successfully defend dissertations on the image of Maximilien Robespierre and the abolition of divorce in France in 1816, thereby completing the requirements of the degree programme.