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Timothy Tackett

Professor, History
School of Humanities

PH.D., Stanford University, 1973

Phone: (949) 824-6320
Fax: (949) 824-2865
Email: ttackett@uci.edu

University of California
244 Murray Krieger Hall
Mail Code: 3275
Irvine, CA 92697

picture of Timothy  Tackett

Research
Interests
The Old Regime and the French Revolution; social, religious and cultural history; violence and terror
   
URL www.hnet.uci.edu/history/faculty/tackett/
   
Academic
Distinctions
1967-68 Fulbright Fellowship to Poitiers, France
1968-69 Ford Foundation Fellowship
1969-70 NDEA Fellowship
1970-73 SSRC Fellowship to France (Foreign Area
Fellowship)
1975 American Philosophical Society Research Grant
HONORS:
1977-78 ACLS Fellowship
1981 American Philosophical Society Research Grant
1982-83 Fulbright Fellowship to Rennes, France
1986-87 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
1987 Camargo Foundation Fellow (Cassis, France)
1988 Woodrow Wilson International Center Guest Scholar
1990-91 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
1996-97 President's Fellowship, University of California
2000-01 National Humanities Center Fellowship
2007 Research Fellowship, Senshu University, Tokyo
2008 Miegunyah Distinguished Lectureship, University of Melbourne
PRIZES:
1978 Shea Prize for Priest and Parish
(best book in religious history)
1978 Phi Alpha Theta Award for Priest and Parish
(best first book)
1983 Koren Prize for "The West in France in 1789"
(best article in French history)
1984 Chester Higby Prize for "The West in France in
1789" (best article in Journal of Modern
History, 1983-84)
1998 Leo Gershoy Prize for Becoming a Revolutionary
(American Historical Association award for best
book in Early-Modern Europe)
2004 Los Angeles Times Book Award Finalist for History: for The King
Takes Flight
   
Appointments 1974-79 Marquette University, assistant professor
1979-85 Catholic University, associate professor
l982-83 University of Rennes, France, visiting
professor
1985-88 Catholic University, professor
1991 Ecole des hautes études en sciences
sociales, Paris, visiting professor
1991 Scuola normale superiore, Pisa, Italy,
visiting professor
1997 Ecole des hautes études en sciences
sociales, Paris, visiting professor
2001 Ecole des hautes études en sciences
sociales, Paris, visiting professor
   
Research
Abstract
Much of my earlier research and writing was concerned with religious culture in France under the Old Regime and the French Revolution. In a first book, I focused on the rural parish clergy and its relations with the peasantry, in part as a means of entering into the cultural perspectives of a largely illiterate population which left no direct records. In a second book, I made use of a civic oath required of all clergymen in early 1791 to explore regional religious culture in France at the end of the eighteenth century and to sort through the social, economic, and political determinants of that culture.

In recent years my research has concentrated on a series of questions related to revolutions: how they arise, how they function, how men and women become revolutionaries, how and why revolutions become violent. In an effort to test conflicting theories about the origins and process of the Revolution of 1789, I published a third book about the 1200 members of the first French National Assembly: their cultural and socio-economic backgrounds and their political options in the course of the Revolution. This study involved both an extensive quantitative analysis of the men of 1789 and an examination of the diaries and letters of about 100 individuals. Currently, I am involved in research on the origins of a Terrorist mentality among the Revolutionary elites, especially through the summer of 1792. As a first installment, I published a book on a single remarkable event that dramatically changed the political dynamics during the Revolution: King Louis XVI's attempt to flee Paris and repudiate the Revolution in June 1791. Another importnat fous focus of research has been the political culture of paranoia.
   
Publications Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume VII: Enlightenment, Reawakening, Revolution (Cambridge, 2006), co-editor
   
  Priest and Parish in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton, 1977)
   
  "A l'epreuve de la Revolution," in Histoire des Catholiques en France, ed. Francois Lebrun (Toulouse, 1980)
   
  "The West in France in 1789: The Religious Factor in the Origins of the Counterrevolutions," The Journal of Modern History (1982)
   
  Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton, 1986)
   
  "Women and Men in Counterrevolutions," The Journal of Modern History (1987)
   
  Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Origins of a Revolutionary Culture (Princeton, 1996)
   
  "Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French Elites and the Origins of the Terror, 1789-1792," American Historical Review (2000)
   
  When the King Took Flight (Harvard, 2003)
   
Link to this profile http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=2520
   
Last updated 02/15/2008