DAVID E. UNDERDOWN PROFESSOR OF MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY
B.A., CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY; M.A., PH.D., UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Andrea Mansker is a modern Europeanist who specializes in French cultural and gender history. Her research interests range from the history of the family, love, war, and consumerism in postrevolutionary France to gendered codes of honor and citizenship during the Third Republic.
She offers courses on revolutionary Europe and the Atlantic world, modern France, and histories of women, gender, reproduction, and crime. Her next seminar will focus on the history of celebrity in early modern and modern Europe.
Mansker’s new book, Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell University Press, 2024), examines the history of matrimonial agents, their novel marketing tactics, and the rise of personal advertisements following two decades of intense change wrought by revolution, war, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s restructuring of the social hierarchy.
Mansker received a summer grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as a fellowship from the Appalachian College Association to complete her archival research for this book and she published several articles and essays on the matchmaking industry. Her article, "Amour, fiction, et voyeurisme dans les petites annonces sous l'Empire," appeared in Histoire, Économie & Société, no. 3 (2020) as part of a special issue on the history of the classifieds in modern France, and her "'Marriages by the Petites Affiches:' Advertising Love, Marital Choice, and Commercial Matchmaking in Napoleon's Paris" appeared in French Historical Studies 41:1 (Feb. 2018). Mansker’s contribution to "Regards croisés sur le mariage à l'époque révolutionnaire et impériale," moderated by Anne Verjus, was published in the Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 388 (June 2017): 143-71, and her essay, "The Legal Pitfalls of Marriage Brokerage in Nineteenth-Century France" was published in the volume, Kinship, Community, and Self: Essays in Honor of David Warren Sabean, eds. Jason Coy, Ben Marschke, Jared Poley and Claudia Verhoeven (Berghahn, 2014).
Mansker’s previous book Sex, Honor and Citizenship in Early Third Republic France was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. This monograph repositions French women's struggle for suffrage within a prewar public culture that celebrated male dueling and dictated the proper social and sexual forms of manly comportment. It argues that women appropriated this exclusionary masculine honor code to formulate a powerful political critique of the family and to create civic spaces where "honor had no sex." Mansker received a John B. Stephenson fellowship from the Appalachian College Association to complete this project.
She has published additional pieces on honor and feminism in Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France: Bodies, Minds, and Gender , edited by Christopher Forth and Elinor Accampo (Palgrave 2010), in Feminist Studies, in the book Honor in the Modern World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Lexington 2016), and in the Dictionnaire des féministes: France, XVIIIe-XXIe siècle, edited by Christine Bard and Sylvie Chaperon (puf 2017).
Courses:
HIST 134: Childbirth in Europe and the Colonial Caribbean
HIST 121: Consumer Culture and Its Discontents
HIST 270: European Women in War, Revolution and Terrorism
HIST 271: The French Revolutionary Era, 1789-1814
HIST 272: France Since 1815
HIST 273: The Haitian Revolution
HIST 378: Sexuality and the Self in Modern Europe
HIST 380: Crimes and Scandals in the Historical Imagination, 18th-20th Centuries
HIST 389: Modernity and Modernism in Europe, 1750-1890
