About

Katie Jarvis is the Carl E. Koch Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Her first book, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, integrates politics, economics, and gender to ask how Parisian market women, called the Dames des Halles, invented notions of citizenship through their everyday trade. Winner of the 2020 Louis Gottschalk Prize and Finalist for the Berkshire Conference First Book Award, this book analyzes how marketplace actors shaped nascent democracy and capitalism and, in doing so, challenges the idea that the French Revolution launched an inherently masculine trajectory for modern citizenship. Her current project, Democratizing Forgiveness in Revolutionary France, explores how the revolutionaries refashioned forgiveness through economic, judicial, gendered, and cultural venues.

Current Research

Her current book project, "Democratizing Forgiveness in Revolutionary France," analyzes how the French revolutionaries refashioned forgiveness in institutional forms. It argues that, amid conflict, the French Revolution forged modern politics and society by reinventing reconciliation. This project reveals how the revolutionaries enacted a cooperative social contract through new restorative judicial practices, religious beliefs, economic relations, and political imaginings. It explores how citizens repaired broken bonds by arbitrating local disputes, forgiving personal loans, and settling retail debt in court. It also considers how citizens reconceptualized reconciliation through sacramental confession and elected priests. In analyzing these everyday practices, her research reveals how women and men seized the tools of the revolutionary state to forge their own visions of the new body politic and of how citizens should interact within it.

Research Sub-Discipline
Countries
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Research Tags

Selected Publications

Books

Journal Articles

Book Chapters

Other Accomplishments & Recognitions
  • Millstone Prize, Western Society for French History, May 2025
  • NEH Fellowship, 2022-2023
  • Louis Gottschalk Prize for best scholarly book on an eighteenth-century subject in any discipline, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2020)
  • American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship (2019)
  • James L. Clifford Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2018)
  • Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, Distinguished Fellow (2016)
  • Natalie Zemon Davis Award, Society for French Historical Studies (2014)
  • Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship (2012–13)
  • Gilbert Chinard Research Fellowship, Institut Français d’Amérique (2012)
  • Fulbright Dissertation Grant (2010–11)
  • Chateaubriand French Government Fellowship (2010–11) (declined)