Department of History | The University of Chicago

The University of Chicago
Department of History
1126 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-8388 -- Office
(773) 702-7550 -- Fax
Email: jegoldst@uchicago.edu

Field Specialties
Modern European Intellectual and Cultural History; Modern France (political and social as well as intellectual and cultural); History of the Human Sciences, esp. Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis; Conceptions of Selfhood and Identity; Historical Methodology.

Biography

My research and teaching interests focus on the intellectual and cultural history of Europe, especially France, from the 18th through the 20th centuries. I am particularly concerned with placing systems of thought in context--that is, situating them in relation to those social and political institutions that help to generate them and that subsequently deploy them. Much of my own work in this vein has concentrated on the psychological sciences and, hence, on the ways that socio-political forces unexpectedly shape our understanding and experience of our innermost selves.

My recent book, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850, examines a literal politics of selfhood, tracing the competition among three psychological theories that all made bids for institutionalization in the French state educational system: sensationalism, phrenology, and the philosophical psychology of Victor Cousin. After completing it, I published Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy, a microhistory of a Savoyard peasant girl whose strange malady brought her to the attention of the medical community in the 1820s. I used the manuscript detailing her case for a variety of methodological purposes: to probe the relationship between text and context; to examine in concrete terms what Foucault might have meant by his claim that “sexuality” emerged as a discursive object only in the early 19th century; and to argue for an area of compatibility between the Foucauldian and Freudian interpretive perspectives

In my current research project, focused on France but with a comparative dimension, I am trying to figure out why biologistic theories of human nature shifted their political affiliation around 1850, going from an alliance with the left in the first half of the 19th century to their now more familiar alliance with the right.

Since 1996 I have served as an editor of the Journal of Modern History.

Selected Publications

Hysteria Complicated By Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux. (Princeton University Press, 2010)

The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850. (Harvard University Press, 2005)

Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century. (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
French translation, 1997
2nd ed. with new afterword (University of Chicago Press, 2001)

Foucault and the Writing of History. (Blackwell, 1994)

"Of Marx and Marksmanship: Reflections on the Linguistic Construction of Class in Some Recent Historical Scholarship," Modern Intellectual History, 2 (2005): 87-107.

"Bringing the Psyche into Scientific Focus: A Political Account," in Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7: The Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.131-153.

"The Future of French History in the United States: Unapocalyptic Thoughts for the New Millennium," French Historical Studies 24:2 (Winter 2001): 1-10

"Mutations of the Self in Old Regime and Post-Revolutionary France: From Ame to Moi to Le Moi," in Lorraine Daston. ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 86-116.

"Enthusiasm or Imagination? Eighteenth-Century Smear Words in Comparative National Context," Huntington Library Quarterly 60 (1998): 29-49.

"Eclectic Subjectivity and the Impossibility of Female Beauty," in Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art (Routledge, 1998), pp. 360-78.

"Saying 'I': Victor Cousin, Caroline Angebert, and the Politics of Selfhood in Nineteenth-Century France," in Michael S. Roth, ed., Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche (Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 321-35, 496-99.

"The Advent of Psychological Modernism in France: An Alternate Narrative," in Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 190-209, 342-46.

"Foucault and the Post-Revolutionary Self: The Uses of Cousinian Pedagogy in Nineteenth-Century France," in Jan Goldstein, ed., Foucault and the Writing of History (Blackwell, 1994), pp. 99-115, 276-80.

"Framing Discipline with Law: Problems and Promises of the Liberal State," American Historical Review98 (April 1993): 364-75

"The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Late Nineteenth-Century France," Representations (Spring 1991): 134-65

"'The Lively Sensibility of the Frenchman': Some Reflections on the Place of France in Foucault's Histoire de la folie," History of the Human Sciences 3 (1990): 333-41.

"The Wandering Jew and the Problem of Psychiatric Anti-Semitism in Fin-de-Siècle France," Journal of Contemporary History 20 (1985): 52l-52

"Foucault Among the Sociologists: The 'Disciplines' and the History of the Professions," History and Theory 23 (l984): 170-92

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Jan E. Goldstein

Norman and Edna Freehling Professor of History
Ph.D. Columbia University 1978