Jennifer N. Heuer

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Professor Heuer’s research interests cluster around interconnected themes of gender, revolution, family, war, citizenship, slavery, and colonialism. 

Her work focuses most on the era of the French Revolution. Her first book was Family and The Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830. Her monograph, The Soldier’s Reward: Love and War in the Age of the French Revolution and Napoleon, is forthcoming in the US in late 2024 and the UK in early 2025. She has published numerous articles in both English and French-language journals and edited collections. Many explore the ways that revolution, war, and peacemaking relate to gender and family life. Other subjects have included the fate of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture’s family in France; French Caribbean prisoners of war in Britain; the history of petitioning as a political tool; clothing as a symbol for competing visions of national identity; the use of familial metaphors for portraying the power of the state; and the ban on interracial marriages in early nineteenth-century France. Her synthetic essays include reflections on the long-term legacies of the French Revolution; recent work on gender and sexuality in European history; thinking about early nineteenth-century Europe as a post-war society; human rights and revolution; and the history of gender and nationalism in Europe. 

Along with Christine Haynes, she is the editor of French Historical Studies. French history colleagues elsewhere, please consider submitting articles!

She has also co-edited Life in Revolutionary France, a collection of fourteen original essays on everyday life in the French Revolution, published in 2020, with Bloomsbury Press, and special issues of several journals, including H-France Salon, Journal of Military History, and the Annales Historiques de la Révolution française.

She has been invited to give talks or participate in national and international forums in the United States, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Japan. (Some cancelled or made virtual in the age of Covid.)

Books

• The Soldier’s Reward: Love and War in the Age of the French Revolution and Napoleon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
• Family and The Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.

Edited Books and Special Issues of Journals

• Life in Revolutionary France, co-edited with Mette Harder. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2020. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/life-in-revolutionary-france-9781350077324/
• "Féminismes en Europe" / "Feminisms in Europe" Annales Historiques de la Révolution française. Co-edited with Anne Verjus and Françoise Orazi. French version: Vol. 411, 2023. English version; forthcoming 2025.
• “Rethinking Race and Representations in Art History in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Francosphere.” Special issue of H-France Salon. Co-edited with Gulru Cakmak. July 2022, Vol 14, no 8. https://h-france.net/h-france-salon-volume-14-2022/#1408
• “Global History, Imperialisms, and the French Revolution.” Special issue of H-France Salon, Nov. 2021, Vol 13, no. 19. https://h-france.net/h-france-salon-volume-13-2021/#1319
• “Ending War: Revisiting the Aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.” Co-edited with Denise Davidson and Christine Haynes. Special issue of the Journal of Military History, 80 no. 1, Jan. 2016.

Selected Recent Articles and Book Chapters

• “Race, Law, and Contested Heritage: Toussaint Louverture’s Family in France.” Journal of Modern History. December 2022.
• “Neither Cowardly Nor Greedy? Buying and Selling Escape from Conscription in Revolutionary and PostRevolutionary France.” French History 
•     E-publication (August 2021): https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crab031.
•     Print publication 36. no. 2 (June 2022).
• (Co-authored with Abigail Coppins), “Race, Liberty, and Everyday Life: French Caribbean Prisoners of War in Britain,” In Life in Revolutionary France, co-edited with Mette Harder. London: Bloomsbury, 2020, 125-152.
• (Co-authored with Mette Harder), “Introduction: Rethinking the Revolutionary Everyday,” In Life in Revolutionary France, co-edited with Mette Harder. London: Bloomsbury, 2020, 1-20.
• (Co-authored with Anne Verjus, Claire Cage, Andrea Masker and Meghan Roberts), “Regards croisés sur le mariage à l’époque révolutionnaire et impériale,” Annales historiques de la révolution française 398 (2017): 144-171.
• “Citizenship, the French Revolution, and the Limits of Martial Masculinity.” In Gender and Citizenship in Historical and Transnational Perspective, eds. Rachel Fuchs and Anne Epstein, 19-38. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
• “Celibacy, Courage, and Hungry Wives: Debating Military Marriage and Citizenship in Pre-revolutionary France,” European History Quarterly 46 no. 4 (2016): 648-667.
• “No More Fears, No More Tears? Gender, Emotion, and the Aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in France,” Gender and History 28 no. 2 (2016), 437-459. 
• “Soldiers as Victims or Villains? Demobilization, Masculinity, and Family in French Royalist Pamphlets, 1814-1815.” Journal of Military History 80 no. 1 (2016), 121-144.
• “Special Issue of the Journal of Military History: Introduction. Ending War: Revisiting the Aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.” (co-authored with Denise Davidson and Christine Haynes). Journal of Military History 80 no. 1 (2016), 11-30. 
• “Did Everything Change? Rethinking Revolutionary Legacies.” The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution, ed. David Andress, 625-641. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.