The Study of European History | List of Courses
Hist 1334: Early Modern Europe (1500-1815)
Hist 1335: Modern Europe
Hist 3335: The Enlightenment
Hist 3336: French Empire in the Americas, 1500-1800
HIST 3337: History of France from the Old Regime to the Present
HIST 4430: Seminar in European History
Kenneth Loiselle | Assistant Professor
Professor Ken Loiselle (Ph.D. Yale working with John Merriman and Timothy Tackett) is a European historian with a particular emphasis on the Enlightenment and French Revolution. His current publications and research focus on the history of private life and he is completing a manuscript on the practices of male friendship within French Freemasonry during the Enlightenment and Revolutionary periods. An earlier version of this project was awarded Yale's Hans Gatzke Prize for the outstanding dissertation in European history. At the heart of this study lies the fundamental issue of trying to assess how ordinary people in the past envisioned and cultivated the social relationship of friendship and the degree to which this bond of solidarity shaded into, complemented or came into conflict with other webs of obligation, such as kinship and conjugal relations.
Future research projects will continue to focus on Freemasonry, notably its experience during the French Revolution and function within the early modern and modern French empires. Professor Loiselle is also an affiliated research fellow at the vibrant Center for Early Modern and Modern Mediterranean Studies at the Université de Nice where he is participating in a collaborative project on the history of European sociability, entitled Communicating Europe: Early Modern Circulations, Territories and Networks.
Loiselle teaches a range of introductory and upper-level European history courses, from 1500 to the present. Some of these include the European Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Modern Europe and France in the Americas. He has been at Trinity since 2008.
He can be contacted at kenneth.loiselle@trinity.edu or x8863.
Publications
Books and Edited Collections
Brotherly Love: Freemasonry and the Culture of Male Friendship in Eighteenth-Century France, in progress.
Co-editor, Diffusions et circulations des pratiques maçonniques en Europe et en Méditerranée, XVIIIe – XIXe siècles (Paris: Editions Garnier, 2011).
Future Research Project
Freemasonry and the French Revolution, in progress.
Articles and Chapters (* denotes peer-reviewed)
* “Friendship and the Circulation of Knowledge in the French Enlightenment: The Case of Dominique Chaix and Dominique Villars, 1772-1799,” in progress.
* “Just Friends: Freemasonry, Women and the Culture of Male Friendship in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Diffusions et circulations des pratiques maçonniques en
Europe et en Méditerranée, XVIIIe – XIXe siècles (Paris: Editions Garnier, 2011).
* “Living the Enlightenment in an Age of Revolution: Freemasonry in Bordeaux, 1788-1794,” in French History 24 (2010). Accessible on-line at: http://fh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/crp067
“Lumières, Révolution et franc-maçonnerie : le cas de l'Anglaise de Bordeaux,” in Renaissance Traditionnelle 156 (2009): 249-266.
* “La correspondance entre francs-maçons au siècle des Lumières: témoignage sur l'histoire de l'amitié, ” in Colloque: Archive épistolaire et Histoire, eds. Mireille Bossis and Lucia Bergamasco (Paris: Editions Connaissances et Savoirs, 2007), 189-202.
* “‘Nouveaux mais vrais amis:’ la Franc-maçonnerie et les rites de l’amitié au dix-huitième siècle,” in Dix-huitième siècle 39 (2007): 303-318.
Publications (Other)
Book review: Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton UP, 2008), for 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 2011.
Book review: Siméon-Prosper Hardy, Mes Loisirs, ou Journal d’événemens tels qu’ils parviennent à ma connoissance (1753-1789), Vol. I (1753-1770), eds. Pascal Bastien and Daniel Roche (Presses de l’Université de Laval, 2008), for H-France Reviews, 2010.
“French Revolution,” in France and the Americas: Culture, Politics and History. A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia, ed. William Marshall (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2005), 482-88.
“Jean-Baptiste du Tertre,” in France and the Americas: Culture, Politics and History. A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia, ed. William Marshall (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2005), 1118-19.
Book review: Richard R. Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2001), for The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography, 2005.