Jeffrey Ravel (History, MIT)

Candidate statement

Jeffrey Ravel is Professor and Head of the History Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (1999), and The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in Seventeenth-Century France (2008). He is currently at work on a history of French playing cards from the Old Regime to the early nineteenth century. He was a co-founder of CESAR (cesar.org.uk), a web site that offers its users data, images, texts, and other material relevant to the study of spectacle in France and Francophone regions from 1600 to 1800. At present he is a co-director of the Comédie-Française Registers Project (cfrgeisters.org), another digital initiative that makes available nightly box office records for over 34,000 performances given by the Comédie-Française theater troupe in Paris from 1680 to 1793. A member of ASECS for a quarter of a century, Ravel edited volumes 35 and 36 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and served as an at-large member of the ASECS Executive Board from 2011 to 2014. He was the Co-President of the Society for French Historical Studies in 2012-2013, and he has been the convener of the Boston-Area French History Group for half a dozen years.