Faculty
Jeffrey Ravel
Professor of History

Jeffrey S. Ravel studies the history of French and European political culture from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. He is the author of The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in Seventeenth Century France (Houghton Mifflin, 2008); and The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (Cornell University Press, 1999). He is currenlty working on a project on fraud and imposture in Old Regime France.

He was Editor for volumes 35 and 36 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, an annual scholarly journal . He was a Co-Founder of CÉSAR, a web site devoted to the study of seventeenth and eighteenth-century French theater. Currently he directs the Comédie-Française Registers Project, a collaborative venture with the Bibiliothèque-musée of the Comédie Française theater troupe in Paris; the goal is to digitize the theater troupe's daily receipt registers for the 1680-1793 period. Ravel is a Member-at-Large of the Executive Board of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. In 2012-2013 he will be Co-President of the Society for French Historical Studies.

Teaching interests include Old Regime and Revolutionary France, European cultural and intellectual history, the history of the book and comparative media studies, and Latin America.