Professor Dena Goodman, a historian of women and gender in the Enlightenment and French Revolution at the University of Michigan, will be presenting a lecture on “Becoming a Man in the Age of Revolutions” at the Newberry Library in Chicago on Saturday, April 9, 2011 at 1:00 p.m.

The event description at the Newberry Library reads: “Professor Goodman seeks to complicate the picture of nineteenth-century reactionary aristocrats and modern republicans by bringing an eighteenth-century perspective to bear on French revolutionary and post-revolutionary culture and society. Her paper will trace the life and career of a boy born less than a decade before the start of the French Revolution and asks how he became a man—and what kind of a man he became—through the successive upheavals of French history, from the Revolution and the Terror through the restoration of the monarchy and the regimes that followed. She argues that he became a ‘new man’ of the nineteenth century only by drawing on family ties and patronage networks deeply embedded in the ancien regime of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.”

Graduate students at Northern Illinois University, as well as students in HIST 423 French Revolution and Napoleon may be interested in attending this lecture.