Dena Goodman

Lila Miller Collegiate Professor of History and Women's Studies Ph.D. Chicago

Contact Information:
2144 Lane Hall
204 S. State St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1290
734.647.0771
Email: goodmand@umich.edu

Website:
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/history/facstaff/facultydetail.asp?id=...

Scholarly Interests: Cultural and intellectual history of France: old regime, enlightenment, and French revolution (1600-1800).

Biography: Dena Goodman is Lila Miller Collegiate Professor of History and Women's Studies and co-director of  “The Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project",  http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/, a digital library project housed at the University of Michigan. Her research and teaching center on the cultural history of early modern France, with particular interests in the Enlightenment, women and gender, material culture, writing, and sociability. Current concerns include questions about how gender shapes mobility in the early modern world, and how materiality and culture interact historically. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, the Voltaire Foundation, and the UM Institute for the Humanities. She is the author of Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (2009), The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994) and the editor most recently of Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of the Queen (2003) and (with Kathryn Norberg) Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past (2006).

Publications:

“L’Ortografe des Dames: Gender and Language in the Old Regime,” French Historical Studies 25 (Spring 2002): 191-223; reprinted in Women, Gender,and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Palgrave, 2005), 195-223.

“Furnishing Discourses: Readings of a Writing Desk in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, ed. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (Palgrave, 2002), 71-88.

“Letter Writing and the Emergence of Gendered Subjectivity in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Women’s History 17 (Summer 2005): 9-37.

“Marriage Calculations in the Eighteenth Century: Deconstructing the Love vs. Duty Binary,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 33 (2005): 146-162.

“Why Is Writing Paper Blue? Colour and Fashion in Eighteenth Century Writing Paper,” in Les Archives de l’invention: Ecrits, objets et images de l’activité inventive, ed. Marie-Sophie Corcy, Christiane Douyère-Demeulenaere, and Liliane Hilaire-Perez (CNRS/Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 2006), 537-546.

“The Sécretaire and the Integration of the Eighteenth-Century Self,” in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century, ed. Goodman and Norberg (Routledge, 2007), 183-203.

“Le Rôle des mères dans l’éducation des pensionnaires au XVIIIe siècle,” in Femmes éducatrices au siècle des Lumières: discours et pratiques, ed. Isabelle Brouard-Arends and Marie-Emanuelle Plagnol (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), 33-44.