Katie Jarvis

Politics in the Marketplace: The Popular Activism and Cultural Representation of the Dames des Halles during the French Revolution

This project examines the political activism and cultural representation of Parisian merchants called the Dames des Halles during the French Revolution. In order to highlight the complexity of female political practice, I analyze the economic, ritual, and gendered elements of the Dames’ activism. I inquire how marketplace reform affected their collective concerns. I also study how other actors deployed the Dames’ image for their own political ends, and probes the genre poissard, whose evolving literary representations of the Dames informed their cultural construction. By examining the relationship among the Dames’ economic interests, activism, and literary image, this dissertation creates new pathways in the sociocultural methodology of history.

Katie Jarvis is an ACLS Residency Fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in European History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on popular politics, broadly conceived, during the French Revolution. She is especially interested in the intersection of social and cultural history, as well as gender history. Her dissertation research has been funded by a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Fulbright Grant, a Council for European Studies/Mellon Foundation Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Society for French Historical Studies, L’Institut Français d’Amérique, La Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones d’Amérique, the Western Association of Women Historians, Phi Alpha Theta, and the UW Department of History. She also collaborates on the international work group “Genre et Classes Populaires” to foster dialogue across national and disciplinary boundaries. She received a B.A. in History from Boston College and a M.A. in European History from UW-Madison.