Patricia Tilburg Chair & James B. Duke Professor of History | Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies

My research and teaching explore questions around gender, sexuality, and culture in modern Europe and especially France from the late 18th century through the mid 20th century. How did late capitalist French society represent and navigate cultural change by reworking traditional tropes of masculinity, femininity, labor, and taste? In addition to my study of modern European culture and history, I helped to found and served as the inaugural chair of Davidson’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Department.

I am the author of Colette’s Republic: Work, Gender, and Popular Culture in France, 1870-1914 (Berghahn, 2009), which explores Third Republican French secular ideology and popular culture through the work and performance of the writer (and music-hall celebrity) Colette. My second book, Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919, (Oxford University Press, 2019) interrogates representations of female Parisian garment workers in popular culture, social reform, and labor activism from the 1880s through the interwar.

Teaching

I teach courses on the history of modern European culture and society, such as the history of the body, modern urban and consumer culture, European feminisms, and revolution and radicalism. My courses include: 

• HIS 122: Europe since 1789
• HIS 228: Modern Bodies: Gender, Sex, and Race in France
• HIS 328: Rebels & Radicals in France - Art and Politics, 1789-1940
• HIS 332: European Metropolis, 1870-1914
• HIS 336: Sexual Revolutions: Women, Gender, & Sex in Modern Europe
• HIS 424: The Global French Revolution
• HIS 427: European Consumer Culture, 1750 to the Present
• HIS/GSS 324: Sex, Law, and Modernity
• GSS 101: Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies
• GSS 201: Feminist and Queer Theories