Associate Professor (1995)

17th- to early 19th-Century France and Europe; Early Modern Intellectual History; Age of Revolutions

On Leave: Spring 2010

Office: 110 Levering Hall

Phone: (434) 924-6967

Fax: (434) 924-7891

Email: sar5dvirginia.edu

Education

B.A. Princeton 1988
M.A. Harvard 1990
Ph.D. Harvard 1996

Publications

A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late 18th-Century France (Stanford University Press, 2001; paperback 2004)

Common Sense: A Political History (Harvard University Press, forthcoming spring 2011)

"On Being Heard: A Case for Paying Attention to the Historical Ear," The American Historical Review, forthcoming (for a special forum on sensory history)

"Thinking About Feeling, 1789-99,"  French Historical Studies 32, no. 4 (fall 2009): 697-706, forthcoming (for a special issue on the state of scholarship on the French Revolution twenty years after the bicentennial)

"Tom Paine's Common Sense and Ours," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 65, no. 4 (October 2008): 633-668

"Before Democracy: The Production and Uses of Common Sense," Journal of Modern History 80, no. 1 (March 2008): 1-54 

"Sign Language as a Political Weapon: The Case of the French Revolution," Sign Language Studies (Fall 2005): 17-37

"Politics, Epistemology, and Revolution," Intellectual News, No. 11/12 (Summer 2003): 64-69

"Citizens of Nowhere in Particular: Cosmopolitanism, Writing, and Political Engagement in Eighteenth-Century Europe," National Identities (special issue: "The Local Life of the Nation") 4, no. 1 (March, 2002): 25-43

"Writing the History of Censorship in the Age of Enlightenment," in Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History, ed. Daniel Gordon (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 117-145

"Les Philosophes and le savoir: Words, Gestures, and other Signs in the Era of Sedaine," in Michel-Jean Sedaine, 1719-1797: Theatre, Opéra-Comique and Art, eds. David Charlton and Mark Ledbury (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate Publishing, 2000), 39-51

"Universal Languages and National Consciousness during the French Revolution," in La Recherche dix-huitiémiste. Raison universelle et cultures nationales au dix-huitième siècle, eds. David Bell, Stéphane Pujol and Ludmila Pimenova (Paris/Geneva: Honoré Champion and Slatkine, 1999), 119-131

"Deaf Men on Trial: Language and Deviancy in Late Eighteenth-Century France," Eighteenth-Century Life (special issue: "Faces of Monstrosity in Enlightenment Thought"), 21, n.s., no. 2 (May 1997): 157-175

Awards and Activities

University of Virginia School of Law, Visiting Professor, 2008-09

American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, 2004-05

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, 2003-04 and spring 2010

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), Visiting Professor, Spring 2004

Remarque Institute for the Study of Contemporary Europe Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, New York University, 1999-2000

East-West Seminar, International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Summer 1996

Spencer Foundation Fellowship for Research on Education, 1994-95

Josephine DeKarman Foundation Fellowship, 1994-95

Mellon Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities, 1993-94, 1989-91

Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard University, 1992-93

Krupp Foundation Fellowship for European Studies, 1992-93

Harvard University Merit Fellowship, 1992

Current Research

My first book, A Revolution in Language (2001), concerns the impact of Enlightenment thinking about language and communication on the political culture of the French Revolution.  I am currently finishing a book about another aspect of Enlightenment epistemology: common sense. This project, Common Sense: A Political History, focuses on the relationship between the idea of common sense and the development of democracy in England, America and Continental Western Europe, including France and the Netherlands.  I am also engaged in an ongoing project about the history of conceptions of European unity and cosmopolitan citizenship since the late 17th century.  Other interests include the history of censorship and the management of dissent, the history of aesthetics and the senses, dance history, and the history of political theory, with a special emphasis on the 17th- to 19th-century Atlantic world.