Marc Lerner
Associate Professor of History
Phone Number: (662)915-7529
Email: mlerner@olemiss.edu
http://history.olemiss.edu/2011/11/18/marc-h-lerner-associate-professor/

Key Words: Early Modern Europe

Research Description: I have been a member of the faculty at the University of Mississippi since 2005 and regularly teach courses on the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Age of Revolution and Nationalism. My research interests are focused on revolutionary Europe in comparative perspective, republicanism and the shift to political modernity. My first book, A Laboratory of Liberty: The Transformation of political culture in republican Switzerland, 1750-1848, appeared in 2012. I look at three different cantons in Switzerland as a way to understand the shift to a politically modern federal state from an early modern confederation. By looking at the republics of Switzerland, with both German speaking and French speaking areas, we can better understand the revolutionary period in Europe as a whole. The second book project, The Uses of the William Tell Story as a Republican Symbol during the Age of Revolution is more explicitly comparative. This book will examine cultural productions in Switzerland, France, Germany, Britain, Italy and the Netherlands that use William Tell as a means to discuss republican politics and revolutionary change without explicitly threatening the status quo or violating censorship laws. The creators of these cultural productions use Tell as symbol in order to make critiques of their own societies. Recent publications include: “Radical Elements and Attempted Revolutions in Late Eighteenth Century Republics”, in André Holenstein, Thomas Maissen and Maarten Prak, eds., The Republican Alternative: The Netherlands and Switzerland compared (Amsterdam University Press, 2008). “The Helvetic Republic: An Ambivalent Reception of French Revolutionary Liberty,” French History 18, no. 1 (March 2004): 50-75.

Honors Theses:

Penley, Hannah Leigh (2011) "Art & Ideologies: A Comparative Analysis of the Relationships Between Augustus and Livy and Napoleon and David" (full text)

Wallace, Joseph Paul (2008) "Jean-Paul Marat: The Politics of Death"