GIS Interdisciplinary Seminar: 'The Revolutionary Self'

GIS Sociabilités seminar 'The Politics of the ‘Sociable Self: Theories and Practices (1650-1850)'

Fifth thematic session on 'The Revolutionary Self', 8 July 2025 (16:00 - 18:00) at Ecole normale supérieure, 45 rue d'Ulm, 75005 PARIS, Salle d'Histoire (escalier D, 2e étage)

Session chaired by Charles Walton (Warwick) & Kimberley Page-Jones (UBO Brest)

in partnership with ENS Ulm

Guest speaker: Lynn Hunt (UCLA)    

Discussant: Sarah Knott (University of Oxford, St John's College)

Zoom link: https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/95441599527?pwd=vuN9RDnLYrRcwn47TaOxO9sJzUP4Iq.1

Abstract:

Lynn Hunt will dig deeper into the relationship between the individual self and social change in the late 18th century. The self is notoriously difficult to define but historians make assumptions about it when writing. What are these assumptions and what does the experience of ordinary people tell us about social change? Do not expect clear answers from neuroscience, psychology or psychoanalysis. 

Bios:

Lynn Hunt is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at UCLA. Born in Panama and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, she has her B.A. from Carleton College (1967) and her M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1973) from Stanford University. Before coming to UCLA, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania (1987-1998) and the University of California, Berkeley (1974-1987). She is the author of many books, several of which focus on the French Revolution, including Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (1984) and Inventing Human Rights (2007). She has also written on Historiography: Measuring Time: Making History (2008) and Writing History in the Global Era (2014). Her most recent book was published in February 2025: The Revolutionary Self Social Change and the Emergence of the Modern Individual, 1770-1800 (W.W. Norton & Company)

Sarah C. Knott is an English historian of women, gender and maternity, and of America and the Atlantic world since the seventeenth century. She is the Hillary Rodham Clinton Professor of Women's History at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of St John's College.  Included among her many books are Women, Gender and the Enlightenment (co-editor with Barbara Taylor, 2005); Sensibility and the American Revolution (2009); and Mother: An Unconventional History (2019).