Fitchburg State College Faculty

Sean Goodlett

Social Science

Website: falcon.fsc.edu/~sgoodlett/

Courses Taught:

• Hist 1000 World Civilizations I
• Hist 1100 World Civilizations II
• Hist 2020 Ancient Greece and Rome
• Hist 2270 Renaissance Europe
• Hist 3420 The French Revolution
• Hist 4000 Historiography
• Lead 1150 Changing World I
• Lead 1250 Changing World II

Education:

• Ph.D. University of Oregon (2000)
• M.A. University of Oregon (1994)
• M.A.Lit. Texas Tech University (1992)
• B.A. University of Texas at Arlington (1990)

Research Interests:

The dissertation was a study of the eighteenth-century Anglo-French press reception of the Genevan philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I am currently rewriting the manuscript for publication as a monograph, broadening the scope of the study through an examination of all contemporary French-language (especially Swiss and Dutch) media. Moreover, I am hopeful that the project will lead to a reexamination of the notion of the “public sphere.” It is increasingly apparent that the “culture of publicity” translated into carefully scripted performances designed for public consumption, and thus the notion of a “public sphere” (bourgeois or otherwise) is itself part of a larger fiction created by the media and other cultural arbiters.

I have a further interest in the selective censorship and repression of Enlightenment authors. A second project, which I am still formulating, will examine the disparity between Enlightenment propaganda and the incidence of imprisonment and punishment. Of particular interest are the “archives de la Bastille” printed in revolutionary-era newspapers like the Révolutions de Paris. My suspicion is that Enlightenment authors rarely found themselves on the receiving end of state-sponsored repression, and instead, as with the case of d’Holbach and other infamous authors, they wrote with impunity. The fiction of an embattled Enlightenment author was both a necessity for its proponents and a later (re)creation of the Revolution.

Current Projects:

In the summer of 2000, I became the history subsection editor of The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography. Colloquially known as ECCB, the annual bibliography serves as a review of record for the field. It provides citations for recent publications as well as reviews of current scholarship in such diverse fields as bibliographic studies, comparative literature, English and American literature, the fine arts, continental (French, German, Italian, and Spanish) literature, history, and the history of science, as well as intellectual history, music, philosophy, and religion.

A second long-term project involves the creation of an “Online SourceBook” for use in courses taught by the Department of Social Sciences at Fitchburg State College. The SourceBook will house a variety of supplementary primary source materials, including documents, images, sound, and ultimately video. (http://sourcebook.fsc.edu/)

Representative Publications:

Biographical entry for Marc-Michel Rey in the OUP Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Entries for “Switzerland,” the “Histoire des deux Indes by the ‘abbé’ Guillaume-Thomas Raynal,” and “Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach” in Censorship: A World Encyclopedia. (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001).

Editor and translator of the correspondence of Jean André Deluc, Jean-André Mongez, Jean Senebier, Martin van Marum, and Pahin de la Blancherie within Jungnickel, Christa and Russell McCormmach, Cavendish: The Experimental Life. (Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 1999).

Review of Adrian Johns’ The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 33 (Fall 1999): 149-150.

Review of Gilbert Py’s Rousseau et les éducateurs: étude sur la fortune des idées pédagogiques de Jean-Jacques Rousseau en France et en Europe au XVIIIe siècle (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997), for The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography, n.s. 23 (1997), forthcoming.

Review of Maurice Cranston’s Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), for The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography, n.s. 23 (1997).