End of the Semester

Spring 2009 Semester is nearly over–and so is my sojourn in New York City, at least for a while. I hate to leave this city. I’d be happy to stay here forever. But my wife is having our baby (child number two, and the last) this fall and she’s still stuck in Ohio. So I will be on leave the whole year to help out there. I only hope I can finish the revisions to the long-awaited book manuscript before the arrival of the baby.

Meanwhile, I’m off to Ohio. The Great Midwest. To live the life of the provincial family man.

Spring Semester 2009

I’ll only be in New York City three full days this semester (Monday afternoon until Thursday afternoon), which is too bad, really, as I love just being in NYC. At any rate, my Isis article is now out and I’m beginning work on a conference paper and new article dealing with the connection between education reform and antislavery in the philosophy of Condorcet. I hope to deliver a version of it in Dublin this July. I also need to use a small grant to visit the BN in France, but I’m not sure that will happen as there are many other matters (some personal) that are going to take up my time this spring and summer.

A big one is the final revision of the book manuscript before sending it off, which I must finish by mid summer. Ostensibly I’ll send it back to U of Rochester Press, but I’m also thinking of shopping around a little more, particularly to Oxford UP, which has been publishing good books in my field recently. I’m determined to get somebody to publish this thing.

Scholarship and Writing As the Semester Draws To An End

Today I received the final page proofs of my forthcoming article in Isis. It looks spectacular, I must admit. This is the first article I’ve published that contains images: there are three photographs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century French journal, the Magasin Encyclopedique. I’m also very happy to be associated with Isis. I began my academic career as a graduate student in a history of science program, but then left that program to complete my Ph.D. in intellectual history. I never let go of my interest in the early modern sciences, however, and my dissertation and continuing book project deal with the intellectual influence of the sciences on public policy and politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

With this article out of the way and the semester of teaching nearly over, I should have a little time to devote myself to scholarly projects. I’m submitting a proposal to deliver a paper at the 2009 meeting of the Society for the Study of French History in Dublin. The paper examines the interesting connection between antislavery activism and education reform in the writing of the French philosophe and revolutionary Condorcet. This is also my next article project. Ultimately this subject is being withdrawn from my book manuscript as it currently exists in order to work as a standalone writing project.

My biggest project remains the book. My readers at the University of Rochester Press gave the manuscript very positive reviews, but ultimately decided against immediate publication in favor of suggesting extensive revision. In fact, I am taking the advice of one of the readers and recasting the manuscript significantly in order better to take advantage of my skills and inclinations as a writer. This will involve a change in the title of the book, a refocus of the subject, a complete rewriting of the introduction, and the removal of chapter five (which will become the article on Condorcet mentioned above). I suspect I will not be able to complete these revisions until late summer. So it goes.

I should also take an opportunity to congratulate my wife, who just had her own book manuscript accepted for publication at Palgrave Macmillan. Hurrah!

Fall Semester 2008 Begins

This fall semester finds me still teaching at CUNY, but it’s an easy teaching load. I’m awaiting a report from University of Rochester press about my book manuscript. I also await the page proofs of my article for Isis, which is supposed to appear in print in December.

I’m beginning work on a new article on the connection between education and antislavery in the political thought of the French philosophe, Condorcet.

I spent much of the summer in the U.K., attending academic conferences and generally goofing off. The grant I received to conduct research in France is, thus far, unused: I plan to fly to Paris in the spring for a few weeks, at most.

No conferences planned for this academic year at this point.

End of the Semester

As the semester ends, I find myself deluged with work like many academics. In addition to the normal grading and teaching, I have had an article accepted for publication but must rapidly complete various revisions. In addition, a university press wants to review my book manuscript and I’ve promised it to them by the end of June with some revisions. I must also somehow write a conference paper for July. One of these things will get short shrift, I suspect.

In other news, I received a research grant from the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY for the summer and managed to get travel funds approved to help pay for the trip to Europe.

Education and the French Revolution

Having finished my review for “Transforming the Republic of Letters” by the deadline–and having written about 500 words more than requested–I have now turned my attention to my own research. Ever since my dissertation work I’ve been interested in the history of education reform, so I’m now working on a project that examines the long term context within which the education reform debates of the French Revolution took place. It’s an attempt to go beyond what R. R. Palmer did in his excellent volume “Improvement of Humanity.” In particular, I’m preparing a conference paper, which I intend to expand into an article, for this summer’s conference in Wales for the Society for the Study of French History. (Incidentally, I’m boycotting the Society For French Historical Studies for its excessive snobbery.)

A Cold And Stormy Night

Indeed it was.

Having finished Transforming the Republic of Letters last Friday, I prepare to write my review. One thing I can say: the book really has the wrong title. It should have been “Transformation of the Republic of Letters”–particularly because the primary agent through which the author presents the historic transformation, Pierre-Daniel Huet, opposed the changes. Rather than “transforming” the social network, he disliked the transformation occurring around him and eventually emerges as a sympathetic, but reactionary figure.

Transforming the Republic of Letters

Since there’s no time like the present to procrastinate, I note here (instead of getting on with the reading and reviewing) that I’ve been asked to review a new book by April Shelford entitled Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650-1720, just out of the University of Rochester Press. Here’s the jacket:

I met Professor Shelford several years ago at a conference in, I believe, Lubbock, Texas, where she told me about this project of hers. I’m glad to see it has appeared now in print and, especially, that I get to have a free copy of it (these Rochester Press books aren’t cheap!). I’ve only just begun to read the volume, so I can say little about contents, but if you’ve ever wondered about the life of Pierre-Daniel Huet, a curious chap who wasn’t too happy with what the philosophes did to his precious respublica litteraria, then this book is for you. Shelford traces the history of the Republic of Letters, that informal, elite society of early modern “intellectuals” that only existed as a network of correspondence and personal exchange as it transformed from a society of elite, Latin-writing Renaissance humanists into a more radical, vernacular, even democratic society of Enlightenment gens de lettres. In brief, the book looks at another front in the early modern Battle of the Ancients and Moderns. Until recently, most scholars found themselves firmly biased in favor of the Moderns, but more recent work has taken a new look at the Ancients, resisting the temptation to think of them as backwards, conservative, reactionaries who hated the progressive Moderns.

As a side note, I have an article I hope will be in print soon that looks at the continuation of Ancient concerns even into the nineteenth century. It is called “The Renaissance of Peiresc.”

The Pessimist’s blog

Hello! My name is Matthew Adkins and this is my personal academic web log. I am currently an assistant professor of history at the City University of New York (see the About page for more about me). Since it seems nearly everyone needs a web presence these days and I grew weary some time ago of maintaining an old fashioned web page, I have decided to create this blog to centralize information about my professional activities. I also run a blog for my courses at cunyhistorytalk.wordpress.com.

For a list of other academic blogs in the field of history, click on the link to Blogs in History to the right.