Jay Smith

John Van Seters Distinguished Term Professor, Associate Dean, & Associate Department Chair of History

564 Hamilton Hall
Campus Box 3195
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3195
919-962-3949 (work)
919-962-1403 (fax)
919-933-6467 (home)
jaysmith@email.unc.edu

M.A. Northern Illinois University, 1985
Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1990

Research Interests

Jay M. Smith is a specialist of early-modern France.  He is interested especially in the cultural negotiation of change over time, at both the individual and collective levels, and he often uses the history of language to gain access to processes of change. Smith has written on the development of royal absolutism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the emergence of patriotic rhetoric and modes of thought in the eighteenth century, the origins of the French Revolution, the history of the nobility, and, most recently, the beast of the Gévaudan, whose fantastic story reveals much about both the 1760s and a modern world that continues to invest the story with meaning. Current research interests include a case study of political corruption in the early 1780s, the early-modern history of lying, and the transition to Revolutionary culture in 1788.  

Smith has taught courses on the French Revolution, France in the Age of Reason, Late Medieval and Early Modern France, eighteenth-century Europe, Aristocratic Identity in the Early Modern Atlantic World, The Age of Louis XIV, and a variety of graduate seminars on early-modern Europe and France. He can be reached by e-mail at jaysmith@email.unc.edu.

Visit the website for his book, Monsters of the Gévaudan.

See the bibliography for Monsters of the Gévaudan.