I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of History working on early modern French history. My other fields include early modern Europe, the Atlantic World, and Comparative Childhood. My dissertation project examines Huguenot (also know as French Calvinist or Reformed) girls and boys from the ‘‘age of reason’’ (age seven) to their twenties. I reconstruct what it meant to grow up in France’s largest early modern religious minority from the signing of the Edict of Nantes (1598), which granted French Calvinists a legal status and degree of toleration in Catholic France, to the aftermath of the revocation of that edict (1685), which criminalized Protestantism and forced Huguenots to convert to Catholicism or flee the country. My analysis, which places particular emphasis on the reconstruction of lived experience, rests on a close reading of disciplinary records (including school records, and documents produced by secular and church courts); letters; diaries and memoirs; and prescriptive literature. I take inspiration from childhood and youth studies, the histories of early modern France and the European Reformation(s), and sociological work on identity. I question how young Huguenots responded to the values with which they were raised; when and why youngsters recognized and performed religious norms of propriety; the agency they had to reshape understandings of Huguenot identity; and, finally, the role(s) that minority status had in these processes. I anticipate completing my dissertation by summer 2026.
‘‘Growing up Huguenot: Childhood, Youth, and Reformed Identity in Interconfessional France, 1598-1685’’
Instructor of Record:
- History 114C: History of Christianity in Europe, 1300-1648 (planned for summer 2025)
- History 122: Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe (summer 2024)
Graduate Teaching Assistant:
- History 4B: Medieval and Early Modern Europe (winter 2021, winter 2022, summer 2022)
- History 4C: Modern Europe (spring 2021, spring 2022)
- History 17A: The American People, Colonial through Jacksonian Era (fall 2024)
- History 121A: Italian Renaissance (summer 2023)
Maddock Research Fellowship, Marsh’s Library, Dublin, Ireland, July 2023
Albert and Elaine Borchard European Studies Fellowship, Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, UCSB, June 2022
Esmé Frost Fellowship, Department of History, UCSB, May 2022
William H. Ellison Graduate Seminar Paper Prize, Department of History, UCSB, May 2021
Emil Steck, Jr. Fellowship, Graduate Division, UCSB, July 2020
Chancellor’s Fellowship, Graduate Division, UCSB, 2019-2025