D'Maris Coffman's Homepage

Welcome to yet another relic of the cyber-crazed nineties - the vanity homepage. Complete with a recent photo, no less. If this were a proper twenty-first century homepage, it would offer a blog with suitably wearisome confessions about colleagues, ex-colleagues, parents & partners, of the sort traditionally directed elswhere. Happily, that seems bad for business, even in academia. So instead, here's a relatively low-calorie plug:

I'm a sixth-year PhD student in the Department of History. I specialize in Early Modern Britain, with an emphasis on late Stuart state formation, Treasury reform and policy, the relationship between taxation and political culture, and the politics of cultural trauma in the early modern period. During the current academic year, I teach two courses per term as a graduate instructor, which is the humblest rank of non-standing faculty. This fall, I am giving an undergraduate seminar (History 201 - Taxation and Revolution in Early Modern Europe) on the political economy of taxation and the rise of the fiscal state. I am also teaching History 002: Europe in a Wider World from 1500 in the College of General Studies. In the spring, I am giving two undergraduate seminars: History 202: Economic Thought from Smith to Marx for my department and History 201: Manias, Bubbles, and Market Failures for CGS.

In September of 2005, I passed my field exams in Early Modern Europe (1450-1750), Modern Europe (1750-2005), Early Modern Britain and European (mostly French) Critical Theories/Cultural Histories. Other graduate students are welcome to use these lists in constructing their own. I don't claim they are in any sense comprehensive and, in any case, they reflect my own intellectual agenda. But they worked for me. The Modern Europe list is perhaps best thought of as a bibliography. This is a teaching field for me. I don't do primary research much after 1815. If you do, you know enough already to fashion a list of 150-200 books. Those looking for exam lists from Ben Mercer's European Graduate Organization (EGO) website should now go to the Clio Club website, which has lists for most of the department's graduate students who took exams in 2001-2006. You have to be a member of the department to subscribe, but it gives a good sense for the range in format, content and length of departmental exam lists. All current departmental graduate students should join Clio. Check it out!

For most of the past two years, I lived in London where I worked on my dissertation: originally titled "'The Devil's Remedy': Excise Taxation in the British Isles, 1650-1700". In 2005-6, I was a pre-doctoral fellow at the at the Institute of Historical Research. I am very grateful to the Social Sciences Research Council for providing me with an SSRC/IDRF fellowship in 2006. Last year, I was a visiting student at the History Department at University College London on the Penn/UCL exchange. The Doris Quinn Foundation generously provided me with financial support in the spring of 2007. The first year I was also a visiting research student at the Centre for History and Economics at Cambridge. All of this research culminated in my discovery that I have enough material for two monographs. My dissertation, subsequently re-titled "The Fiscal Revolution of the Interregnum: Excise Taxation in the British Isles, 1643-1663," concentrates on the first twenty years. Abstracts and chapter outlines available upon request.

Most of my friends and family are too modest to put their lives online for public consumption (after all, for shameless self-disclosure we have Facebook), but a few have chosen to do so for professional reasons. Alan Allport, Erika Lin, Jack Lynch, and Andrea Schalk all maintain interesting descriptions of their teaching, activism and research. Jack Lynch's guide to Eighteenth Century Resources Online is nearly legendary, and quite a respectable clearinghouse for late C17 and early C19 information as well.

Finally, if you're interested in studying at the University of Pennsylvania, I'm probably not the best, nor even a good, person to ask. I know next to nothing about Undergraduate Admissions except that they're much more competitive than they were when I first came to Penn as a freshman over a decade ago. The Graduate Admissions Office of the School of Arts & Sciences is always good about answering general enquiries from prospective students. That said, I would be more than happy to speak with prospective graduate students in European History (particularly the Early Modern period), as well as staff members at Penn interested in pursuing graduate degrees or postbac work in the humanities. I can't promise infallible advice, but I will do my best to be of assistance.