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Howard G. Brown

Professor and Chair
D.Phil., Oxford University, 1990
Early Modern Europe, France, politicized violence

Office: LT 717  
Phone: (607) 777-4562 E-mail: hgbrown@binghamton.edu
My undergraduate courses stress the importance of history as a highly interpretative discipline whose value depends on a rigorous treatment of evidence. My graduate courses are designed primarily to acquaint students with recent historical debates and methodologies. My recent book, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression From the Terror to Napoleon, combines extensive archival research and a wide array of historical methods to examine the years between the Terror and the Empire. It argues that despite the ringing slogans of 1789, liberal democracy was not the most significant outcome of the French Revolution. Rather, after years of politicized violence and perverted justice, of regional revolt, endemic banditry, citizen juries, and militarized policing, France's illiberal democracy quickly gave way to a modern "security state." My current work is on the concept of trauma and whether its current use in psychological and legal contexts can help to illuminate individual and collective experiences of violence in the revolutionary period.

Recent or current undergraduate courses:

  • Cultures in Conflict, 1500-1850
  • Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe
  • Privilege & Protest in Early Modern Europe
  • France: Renaissance to Revolution

Recent or current graduate courses:

  • European Violence in the Pre-Modern Era
  • Views of the French Revolution
  • Culture and Society in 18th-Century France
  • Crime, Poverty & Repression in Early Modern Europe
  • US/European Research Seminars

Received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2004

Significant Publications

Books:

  • Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, Repression (University of Virginia Press, 2006), 480 pp.
    - received the American Historical Association's 2006 Leo Gershoy Award for the best book in seventeenth and eighteenth-century European History
    -     received the 2004 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work in eighteenth-century studies
    http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/brown2.HTM.
  • Taking Liberties: Problems of a New Order from the French Revolution to Napoleon, co-edited with Judith A. Miller (Manchester University Press, 2002; Palgrave, 2003), 210 pp.
  • War, Revolution, and the Bureaucratic State: Politics and Army Administration in France, 1791-1799 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 361 pp.

Recent Articles and Book Chapters:

  • “The Napoleonic Security State: Special Tribunals,” in Alan Forrest and Philip Dwyer, eds., Napoleon and the Empire (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), pp. 79-95.
  • "A Disquieting Sense of Déjà Vu," The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 4, 2006, pp. B10-B11, (2200 words).
  • “Tips, Traps, Tropes: Catching Thieves in Post-Revolutionary Paris,” Clive Emsley and Haia Shpayer Makov, eds., Police Detectives in History, 1750-1950 (Ashgate, 2006), pp. 33-60.
  • “Revolt and Repression in the Midi Toulousain (1799),” French History 19 (2005): 232-61.
  • “Echoes of the Terror,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 29 (2003): 529-58.
  • “The Search for Stability” in Howard G. Brown and Judith A. Miller, eds., Taking Liberties: Problems of a New Order from the French Revolution to Napoleon (Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 20-50.
  • “The French Revolution and Transitional Justice” in Edward R. McMahon and Thomas A. P. Sinclair, eds., Democratic Institutions Performance: Research and Policy Perspectives (Praeger Publishing, 2002), pp. 77-95.
  • "Mythes et massacres: reconsidérer la 'Terreur directoriale,'" Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, no. 325 (2001): 23-52.
  • "Domestic State Violence: Repression from the Croquants to the Commune," The Historical Journal 42 (1999): 597-622.
  • "An Unmasked Man in a Milieu de Mémoire: the abbé Solier as Brigand-Priest," Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 26 (2000): 1-30.
  • "From Organic Society to Security State: The War on Brigandage in France 1797-1802," Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 661-95.
  • "Pouvoir, bureaucratie et élite d'état: la politique révolutionnaire du contrôle et de l'administration de l'armée, 1791-1799," Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, no. 303 (1996): 119-38.
  • "Politics, Professionalism, and the Fate of Army Generals after Thermidor," French Historical Studies, 19 (1995): 133-52.

Conference Organization:

  • Program committee for the international conference Violence and the French Revolution held at the University of Maryland, October 26-27, 2001.
  • Co-organizer with Judith A. Miller of the international symposium The Impossible Settlement: Problems of a New Order in Post-Revolutionary France held at Emory University, November 12-13, 1999.

 

Recent Grants and Fellowships

  • Florence Gould Foundation Conference Support Grant, 1999
  • Emory University International Studies Grant, 1999
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1997-98
  • Visiting Fellow, Cornell University, 1997-98
  • American Philosophical Society Travel Grant, Summer 1997
  • Binghamton University Research Grant, Summer 1996
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 1995