Graduate Student Milestones
During the past year, Institute graduate students racked up a number of accomplishments. In October 2001, Matthew Williams defended his MA thesis on the impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on the British East India Company. Entitled “Imperial Chimera: The Evolution of the British East India Company, 1763-1813,” it offered a non-European perspective on the worldwide impact of the Napoleonic wars and received the highest praise from his committee. Both Jonathan Deverse and Tarah Luke successfully defended their Ph.D. dissertation prospectii in Spring 2012. Tarah also defended her comprehensive examinations in the same meeting. Her double defense (prospectus and comps) marks a departmental first. Tarah completed initial archival research (in New Orleans) for her dissertation, on the political uses of the image of Napoleon in 19th century America, last summer. Jonathan is spending the summer in France conducting research for his dissertation on the rise and fall of Theophilanthropism, the last and arguably most influential attempt by the French Revolution to establish a new religion compatible with revolutionary political principles.
Thanks to financial support from the Ben Weider fellowships, three other Institute students made great strides toward finishing up their dissertation research during the past year. Cindy Ermus completed her research on European reactions to the plague in Marseille in archives in Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Paris, Cadiz, Seville, and Madrid. Tim Best completed his research in the Archives Nationales in Paris on the remaking of the French system of tariffs during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Joshua Meeks carried out his research in London, Paris, and Bastia on the strategic role of the Anglo-Corsican Kingdom in the Western Mediterranean theater, 1793-1796. His research was supported by both a Weider fellowship and a dissertation research grant from the Fondation Napoléon and a teaching assistantship at the FSU London Center. Joshua also passed his comprehensive examination in Fall 2011.
Several Institute students published articles during the past academic year. Cindy Ermus published an article in Louisiana History on the great New Orleans fire of 1788 (based on her MA thesis). Tarah Luke published an article on American attitudes toward Napoleon in Napoleonic Scholarship. And Joseph Horan had an article on Napoleon's attempts to cultivate cotton in Southern Europe accepted for a volume of essays on the history of science, which should be coming out in 2013. Finally, Pat Perella gave a paper on Citizen Genet at the annual meeting of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era in Baton Rouge.
In sum, the cohort of students who were admitted to the Institute in 2008 have now all passed into the ABD stage and are well advanced in their doctoral research. We should be seeing a number of dissertation defenses over the next several years.
Incoming Institute Students
As the majority of the current group of students has completed its coursework and achieved doctoral candidacy, 2012 was an ideal moment to recruit a new generation of Institute students. And, indeed, it was a banner year for recruitment. Ten students applied for the Institute, of whom six will be attending. The incoming students are Caleb Greincke (who will be the 2nd recipient of the Donald D. Horward graduate fellowship in military history, following the highly successful first year of the original recipient, Arad Gigi, who will be passing on to a departmental assistantship), Christian Juergens, Jesse Pyles, Nicholas Stark, and Andrew Thompson, all of whom will be attending with Weider fellowships. In addition, we will be joined by Patrick Thibault, the department's first French Canadian student, who has received financial aid from both the Florida-Canada Linkage Institute and a Weider graduate fellowship. We expect great things from this incoming cohort!
Activities of the Institute Professors
During the 2011-12 academic year, Dr. Darrin McMahon had many outstanding achievements. Until December 2011, he was in Berlin on an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers and also held an appointment as Guest Professor at the Historisches Institut at the University of Potsdam. During his time in Berlin, he completed Genius: A History, which will be coming out shortly with Basic Books. He also finished another book, Modern Intellectual History, a collection of essays co-edited with Samuel Moyn, which will be published by Oxford University Press. In addition, he co-organized a conference with Professor Joyce Chaplin of Harvard, “Genealogies of Genius”, which was held at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, this month.
During the 2011-12 academic year, Dr. Rafe Blaufarb was on research leave in London, where he completed the British part of his archival research for a book on the naval history of the wars of Latin American independence and the role of American, British, and French naval veterans in that conflict. He was also a visiting professor at the University of York, and he also gave talks at the University of Oxford, the University of London, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and the University of Amsterdam. In March 2012 his book, The Politics of Fiscal Privilege was published with Catholic University Press. He also published articles on aspects of Napoleonic military history in Military History and the Military History Quarterly.
2011-2012 was a productive year for the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution. In particular, the graduate students passed many key milestones (comprehensive examinations, prospectus defenses, MA defenses, and Ph.D. research). And the new group of incoming students is extremely promising. I thank you all for your continuing support, which makes the Institute's accomplishments possible.