Dr. Wilson is an Associate Professor of History with a teaching focus on European History and is also an Associate in the Women’s and Gender Studies program here at NAU. She obtained her M.A. and Ph.D. in History and Humanities from Stanford University in 1982 and her B.A. in History, Literature and Philosophy from Wesleyan University in 1974. Her recent projects include a book published by John Hopkins University Press, Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment: The Debate over Maladies des Femmes, which uses medical debates to gain insight into cultural and social trends in early modern France. She is currently working on a new monograph as well, “Not Made in the Images of Newton, Darwin, and Freud: French Translators and Women of Science, Du Châtelet, Royer, and Bonaparte,” which examines the work and lives of the women who translated cultural icons.
Dr. Wilson’s most popular courses include: HIS 240: The Development of Europe to 1650, which examines the major themes, periods, and methods in the cultural and social history of Europe from ancient Greece thought 1660. Significant works of literature, philosophy, political theory, art and music are considered. HIS 300W: Topics in History: Witch-Hunts, which combines rigorous inquiry into the subject of witch-hunts with sustained instruction in writing. HIS 341: Early Modern Europe 1600 to 1789, is the study of The Age of Absolutism, Scientific Revolution, Witch Hunts, Enlightenment, the Glorious Revolution, and the French Revolution as seen through works of history, literature, philosophy, religion, science, art, drama, film. HIS 475: Topics in Medicine, Cultures, Values: Bodies and Souls explores how critical aspects of human experience like birth, sexuality, food, and death that once were filled with religious meaning have become secularized and medicalized.
She encourages all students to consider studying abroad and becoming part of the international community here at NAU: “To be at home in all lands and all ages is the mark of an educated person.” More information can be found on the History Department’s web page “Global Opportunities” as well the NAU study abroad website.
BOOK:
Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment: The Debate over Maladies des Femmes. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
IN PROGRESS:
“Not Made in the Images of Newton, Darwin, and Freud: French Translators and Women of Science, Du Châtelet, Royer, and Bonaparte”
ARTICLES/CHAPTERS:
“Mediating Science in Early Modern England and France: Issac Newton and his Translator, Emilie Du Châtelet,” Translation and the Intersection of Texts, Contexts and Politics, ed. Mohammed Albakry. London, New York, Shanghai: Palgrave Macmillan. July 2017: 39-62. “Afterlives: Searching for the Real Mme Du Châtelet and Honoring Women in the Future,” Women in French (January 2016): 16-32. “Crossing Boundaries of Gender, Genre, and Country: The Intellectual Trajectory of Mme Du Châtelet,” Women in French (January 2012/2015): 72-86. “Representations of Women in the History of Science in France: Going Beyond Names without Faces and Faces without Doctrines.” In Women and Science, Seventeenth Century to Present: Pioneers, Activists, and Protagonists, ed. by Donna Andréolle and Véronique Molinari, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars (December 2011): 140-154. “’Judge the Work and Not the Man’: Casting Light on Marie Curie, Sigmund Freud, Identity Politics, and a Double Standard in Historiography.” In Connections: European Studies Annual Review (Spring 2010): 2-7.
REVIEWS:
Review of Sabine Arnaud’s On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820, Early Modern Women Journal (2017, vol. 12.1).
Review of Jennifer Evans’s Aphrodisiacs, Fertility, and Medicine in Early Modern France, The American Historical Review (April 2016): 645-6. Review of Robert Weston’s Medical Consulting by Letter in France (1665-1789) and Joel Coste’s Les Écrits de la souffrance, Isis, Journal of the History of Science Society (March 2016): 163-165
Internal Review of Marvin Perry, ed., Sources of the Western Tradition for Cengage press (2015).
Review of Timothy Verhoeven’s Transatlantic Anti-Catholicism. France and the United States in the Nineteenth Century, Left History (Spring/Summer 2012): 133-134.
Review of James Webb’s Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria for The Canadian Journal of History (Fall 2011): 466-468.