Denise Davidson
Professor, and Humanities Research Center Director History- Education
PhD, History, University of Pennsylvania
MA, History, University of Maryland
BA, History, Rutgers University
- Biography
Denise Davidson specializes in modern Europe with a focus on 18th- and 19th-century France. Most of her work thus far has focused on social and cultural history, gender history, and the history of the family. However, her future research plans include studying French commercial relations in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Revolutionary Era. Her forthcoming book, Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters, will be published by Cornell University Press in October 2025. Her first book, France After Revolution, was published by Harvard University Press in 2007. In 2011 she published a co-authored book in French titled Le Roman Conjugal. One of her more recent articles, "The New (Emotional) Regime: Bourgeois Reactions to the Turmoil of 1814-1814," appeared in the journal French Historical Studies in 2019.
Dr. Davidson's graduate students have worked on a wide range of topics including early nineteenth-century Anglo-American representations of Islamic Spain, immigration in post-war France, French and Francophone African perceptions of the American Civil Rights Movement, and the life and public persona of Madame du Barry.
Dr. Davidson is also the founding director of the College of Arts and Sciences' Humanities Research Center (HRC), which was established in Fall 2017. For more information about the HRC and its programs please visit humanities.gsu.edu. She is also affiliate faculty in the Institute for Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
- Publications
- “Gender and the Age of Revolutions in Private Lives,” in Age of Revolutions: A Global History, 1650 to the Present, eds. Bryan Banks and Cindy Ermus (forthcoming, University of Virginia Press).
- Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters (Forthcoming, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2025).
- “Notes et souvenirs … sur la vie politique de mon père: Memory, Mourning, and Politics in the Revolutionary Era,” in Everyday Politics and Culture in Revolutionary France: Essays in Honor of Lynn Hunt, Victoria Thompson, Bryant T. Ragan, and Suzanne Desan (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), 199-225.
- “Bourgeois Families and their Survival Strategies,” H-France Salon 16, No. 5, #4 (Oct. 2024).
- “Introduction: Emotions révoluionnaires,” to special issue co-edited with Karine Rance and Valérie Sottocasa, Annales historiques de la Révolution Française 415 (Jan. – Mars. 2024): 3-12.
- “Eugénie Grandet, or Balzac Modernized,” Imaginaries: Films, Fictions, and Other Representations of French-Speaking Worlds (Nov. 2023).
- “The New (Emotional) Regime: Bourgeois Reactions to the Turmoil of 1814-1814,” French Historical Studies 42, No. 4 (Oct. 2019): 595-621.
- “Introduction. Ending War: Revisiting the Aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars,” introduction to special issue co-authored and co-edited with Christine Haynes and Jennifer Heuer Journal of Military History 80, No. 1 (Jan. 2016): 11-30.
- “‘A belle-mère idéale, gendre ideal…” in L’Histoire des belles-mères, ed. Yannick Ripa (Paris: Belin, 2015), 173-80.
- “Local Identities and Internal Migration: Networking as a Survival Strategy in Revolutionary and Postrevolutionary France,” in Place and Locality in Modern France, Philip Whalen and Patrick Young (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 151-60.
- “Feminism and Abolitionism: Transatlantic Trajectories,” in The French Revolution in Global Perspective, ed. Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 101-10, endnotes pp. 208-12.
- “Domesticating the Exotic: The Giraffe Craze and French Consumer Culture,” in Of Elephants and Roses: Encounters with French Natural History, 1790-1830, ed. Sue Ann Prince (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2013), 205-13.
- “Generational Conflict in Revolutionary France: Widows, Inheritance Practices, and the ‘Victory’ of Sons,” co-authored with Anne Verjus, William and Mary Quarterly 70, No. 2 (Spring 2013): 399-424.
- “‘Happy’ Marriages in Early Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of Family History 37 (Jan. 2012): 23-35.
- Le Roman conjugal. Chroniques de la vie familiale à l’époque de la Révolution et de l’Empire, co-authored with Anne Verjus (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2011).
- “L’identité sociale et politique au quotidien, 1789-1815,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 359 (January-March 2010): 161-80.
- “Michelle Perrot,” in French Historians, 1900-2000: The New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France, ed. Philip Daileader and Philip Whalen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 475-85.
- France after Revolution: Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
- “Making Society ‘Legible’: People-Watching in Paris After the Revolution,” French Historical Studies 28, No. 2 (Spring 2005): 265-96.
- “Women at Napoleonic Festivals: Gender and the Public Sphere during the First Empire,” French History 16, No. 3 (Sept. 2002): 299-322