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David Bell Dean of the Faculty of the KSAS The Johns Hopkins University Telephone: 410-516-7578 Personal Website I am primarily a historian of early modern France, and my particular interest is the political culture of the Old Regime and the French Revolution. I have written three books. Lawyers and Citizens (Oxford University Press, 1994) examined the politicization of the French legal profession in the eighteenth century, showing how spaces for radical criticism of the French monarchy first opened up within the structure of the French state itself. The Cult of the Nation in France (Harvard University Press, 2001) argued that nationalism, as opposed to national sentiment, was a novelty of the French Revolutionary period, and that it arose both out of, and in reaction to, Christianity. The First Total War (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), is a general study of the political culture of war in Europe between 1750 and 1815, which shows how an aristocratic culture of limited warfare gave way to a world in which total war was possible—and in which, between 1792 and 1815, it actually took place. I attended graduate school at Princeton, where I worked with Robert Darnton, and received my Ph.D. in 1991. I then spent several years teaching at Yale, and moved to Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1996. My teaching here focuses on early modern France, but reflects other interests as well. I offer undergraduate survey courses on European history from 1492 to the present, and on the French Revolution. Advanced undergraduate seminars include a course on the art of narrative history, and another on the history of the French empire in the Americas. I have taught graduate courses on early modern France, on nationalism, on war, on the first French empire, on the Enlightenment, and on the way thinkers have understood the Enlightenment over the past quarter-millenium. I welcome applications from prospective graduate students interested in working on topics related to French history from 1600 to 1850. I have supervised, or am presently supervising, Ph.D. dissertations on topics that range from the image of the Enlightenment in the birth of modern conservatism, to the transfer of eighteenth-century scientific knowledge from Latin America to France, to the academic essay competitions of eighteenth-century France. I am currently serving as Dean of the Faculty of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, and plan on returning to full-time teaching and research in 2010. As dean, I am continuing to teach and supervise graduate students. In addition to my research and teaching, I write frequently for a range of general-interest publications, particularly The New Republic, where I am a contributing editor. I am committed to the proposition that serious history can be readable, enjoyable, and accessible to an interested general public. My home page, https://jshare.johnshopkins.edu/myweb/davidbell, provides a selection of my recent writings, course syllabi, and a selection of research materials. |
Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities