Meghan K. Roberts

Meghan K. Roberts

Meghan Roberts is Assistant Professor of History at Bowdoin College. Her research explores the Enlightenment as a lived experience: what did people think it meant to live in an enlightened age, and how did they put their ideals into practice? What does the history of the Enlightenment tell us about our current culture of expertise and challenges to it? Her first book, Sentimental Savants: Philosophical Families in Enlightenment France (University of Chicago Press, 2016), studied the family home as both a laboratory for testing new ideas and as a stage in which philosophers could feature themselves and their families as models for the public to follow. She is now at work on a second book project, a study of medical practitioners in eighteenth-century France. This book studies the rise of medical expertise through a collection of interlocking microhistories, with each chapter focused on a particular practitioner or debate. At the same time, Meghan is writing a series of articles on the history of emotions as lived experience. The first of these, “Laclos’s Objects of Affection: Venerating the Family During the French Revolution,” has been accepted for publication in Eighteenth-Century Studies. www.meghankroberts.com

View the material that Meghan has curated for this website here.

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