Lila Miller Collegiate Professorship in History and Women's Studies Inaugural Lecture: "Episodes in the History of Intellectual Sociability: From the French Enlightenment to the University of Michigan"

Research may be conducted in libraries and laboratories, teaching in lecture halls and seminar rooms, but important intellectual work also goes on in living rooms and other informal meeting spaces. In this talk, Dena Goodman focuses on sociability as an important dimension of intellectual life from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing on both experience and historical research she reflects on the gendered cultural practices of intellectual sociability in the salons of the French Enlightenment, the clubs of the French Revolution, and faculty groups and organizations in the twentieth-century American university.