Faculty

Lauren Clay
Assistant Professor of History

PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2003

Early modern/modern Europe with a focus on France; social and cultural history; history of business, labor, and commercial society; theater; urban history; French empire.

Telephone: 615-322-5947
Email: lauren.clay@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: TBA in August
Office: 101 Benson Hall

Curriculum vitae: Lauren Clay's CV

Lauren Clay is a historian of early modern France with particular interests in urban cultural and civic life, the emergence of a commercially oriented society, and the relationship between Paris and the French provinces.   Her publications include “Patronage, Profits, and Public Theaters: Rethinking Cultural Unification in Ancient Regime France,” in The Journal of Modern History (2007) and “Provincial Actors,  the Comédie-Française, and the Business of Performing in Eighteenth-Century  France,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies (2005), which was the co-winner of the 2006-2007 James Clifford Prize, awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.  Her book, tentatively entitled Culture, Commerce, and the State:  The Theater Industry in France and the Colonies in the Late Ancien Regime (forthcoming with Cornell University Press) examines the introduction of professional public theater into cities throughout France and the French empire.  She has also begun work on a new project focusing on the development of commercial culture in France’s cities through a study of chambers of commerce.  Clay’s scholarship has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Fulbright Program, among others.

Clay completed her PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania (2003). She joined the Vanderbilt faculty from Texas A&M University, where she taught from 2003-2008.  She teaches courses focusing on France, Paris, early modern and modern European history, and the Enlightenment, as well as a graduate seminar on historical methods and research.