Department of History

Ralph Kingston, Assistant Professor in European history (Revolutionary Era), PhD University of London/UCL (2002), BA Trinity College Dublin (1997). His research interests straddle the cultural, intellectual, and social histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. He also has an active interest in science and technology studies and in the social history of space. A review essay on the Spatial Turn in History will appear in Cultural and Social History in early 2010.

Dr. Kingston is also currently completing his first book project, Office Politics: Bureaucrats and Bourgeois Culture in Postrevolutionary France, 1789-1848. This book looks at changes in administrative culture in the 1790s and their ongoing effects on the daily lives of office workers, one of the most visible (and most criticized) segments of a new nineteenth-century bourgeois society. One part of this study, on new office spaces during the French Revolution, has been published in French History (December 2006). This article won the 2008 Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-century Studies (SEASECS) Percy V. Adams prize.

During a postdoctoral British Academy fellowship, held at University College London, Dr. Kingston also began a new project, entitled "Geography and Its Networks." This book-length project looks at the development of a "mixed" geography during and after the French Revolution, at the construction of new interdisciplinary scientific methodologies and networks of co-operation in institutions like the Paris Society of Geography. A recent article in Endeavour looked more closely at the failure of scientific cooperation onboard an early nineteenth-century voyage of discovery led by Nicolas Baudin.

As well as teaching World History I and II, Dr. Kingston teaches courses on early modern and modern Europe, including a 5000-level course on the Enlightenment and Revolution, 1715-1815, Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1815-1918,and a graduate seminar on the French Revolution.

He is also actively involved in running an interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies group at Auburn.

• 2002 PhD, University of London/UCL
• 1997 BA, Trinity College Dublin

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