About Me
Welcome. My name is Matthew Adkins (hence the title). I have a Ph.D. in European history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and I work as a professor teaching courses ranging from Ancient Greece to the French Revolution. My academic writing focuses generally on cultural and intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I have published articles on science and ethics in early modern France, on the Royal Academy of the Sciences in the seventeenth century, on the French antislavery movement in the eighteenth, and on the Republic of Letters in the nineteenth. I’m currently finishing up (really) a book on science and despair in the political thought of the French Enlightenment.
At the moment I’m teaching at Wright State University in Dayton, OH, having recently resigned a tenure-track assistant professorship at the City University of New York. I have a wife and two daughters in Dayton, Ohio, and I grew very weary of commuting between New York and Ohio during the past two years. I’m on the hunt for a full-time professorship in this part of the country—although I must admit I miss New York City, my favorite city in the world. The picture above was taken from the roof of my Brooklyn apartment before I left the city.
Before teaching at CUNY, I taught at Miami University, the University of Dayton, and Antioch College.
