Adrian O'Connor
Ph.D. Candidate (ABD)
adriano@sas.upenn.edu
Education
B.A., History (Hons) and Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania, Summa Cum Laude (2003)
Fields
Modern European Intellectual History; Modern Europe from 1700; Early Modern Cultural History
Dissertation
"Reading, Writing, and Representation: Politics and Education in Revolutionary France, 1762-1795"
Dissertation Committee
Personal Statement
Since entering the Ph.D. program in 2003, I have worked on the relationship between scholarly life, educational institutions, and political culture in pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France. My work has focused increasingly on changing ideas of political representation, citizenship, and the place of education in debates over political practice and legitimacy. Initially concentrated on the early years of the Revolution (1789-1794), my research has come to include the period between the 1760s and the last days of the ancien régime. I have presented preliminary findings on each of these periods at academic conferences, including the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe (now the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era) in February 2005, the Barnes Club Conference at Temple University in April 2006, and the Historicising the French Revolution conference at the University of Cambridge in November 2007. The last of those papers is to be published in the Historicising the French Revolution collection, forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. I am currently living in New York and working to complete the dissertation (Ph.D. expected spring 2009).
Publications
“The Educational Proposals of the French Revolution: A Case Study in the Intellectual and Cultural History of Expectations,” in Historicising the French Revolution, C. Armenteros, T. Blanning, I. DiVanna, and D. Dodds, eds., (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).
