Please join us for a talk by Ralph Kingston, Associate Professor and History Department Graduate Program Officer of Auburn University's History Department. The title of Kingston's talk is "‘We will never be Humboldt’: Career-Making and Collaboration in Early Nineteenth-Century French Exploration."

Dr. Kingston will join us on Wednesday, March 19, 2014, at 3:00 p.m. He will speak in Heritage Hall 121. Please call the Department of History at 934-5634 for information. This event is free and open to the public. 

Dr. Kingston’s book, Bureaucrats and Bourgeois Society: Office Politics and Individual Credit, France 1789-1848, appeared in 2012, published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book looks at changes in administrative culture in the 1790s and their ongoing effects on the daily lives of office workers, one of the most visible (and most criticized) segments of a new nineteenth-century bourgeois society.

During a postdoctoral British Academy fellowship, held at University College London, Dr. Kingston began a new book-length project, tentatively entitled Going Places, Exploring Spaces: French Expeditions and the Practice of Scientific Exploration, c.1750-1850. This book follows the men and women involved in proposing and patronizing, crewing and operating, debating and defining French explorations at sea and on land in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It places them in specific material and social spaces: the ship and the camp, the meeting rooms of Parisian learned societies, the museum, and the colonial outpost. Part of this project, published in article in Endeavour, looked more closely at the failure of scientific cooperation onboard an early nineteenth-century voyage of discovery led by Nicolas Baudin.