Meghan Roberts

A scholar of eighteenth-century France, I work at the intersections of cultural history, the history of science and medicine, and the history of women and gender. I published my first book, Sentimental Savants: Philosophical Families in Enlightenment France, with the University of Chicago Press in 2016. My current research examines how eighteenth-century French medical practitioners established and exercised their authority during an age of media revolution and colonial exploitation. For an up-to-date CV, list of courses, and recent publications, please visit my personal website.

Selected Publications

Book

Sentimental Savants: Philosophical Families in Enlightenment France(University of Chicago Press, 2016)

 

Articles and Chapters

With Laurie Wood, “Losing (and Finding) Charlotte Dugée: Locating Women of Color in Enlightenment Science,” American Historical Review, forthcoming in December 2026. 

 

“‘I’ll have Belle for my wife, make no mistake about that’: Courtship and Coercion in Beauty and the Beast,” in The 18th Century Today, eds. Emrys Jones and Madeleine Pelling (Bloomsbury, 2026), 121-136.

 

“Making Race and Reputations in Eighteenth-Century France,” History Workshop Journal 98 (Autumn 2024), 135-154.

 

"Spontaneous Human Combustion and Claude-Nicolas Le Cat’s Hunt for Fame," Journal of Modern History 93 no. 4 (December 2021), 749-782.

 

"Laclos's Objects of Affection: Venerating the Family During the French Revolution," Eighteenth-Century Studies 51.3 (2018)

 

"Learned and Loving: Representing Women Astronomers in Enlightenment France," Journal of Women's History 29.1 (2017)

 

"Philosophes Mariés and Epouses Philosophiques: Men of Letters and Marriage in Eighteenth-Century France," French Historical Studies 35.3 (2012)