Dr Joseph Clarke

Head of Department

Associate Professor in European History

Research Interests

My research revolves around the relationship between cultural change and political conflict in Western Europe over the long eighteenth century. To date, this has focussed on a variety of themes: the culture and politics of memory in eighteenth-century France, the evolution of attitudes towards death over the eighteenth century and, most recently, the dynamics of violence in France and across the Mediterranean world during the Revolutionary period. From 2018 to 2024, I was co-editor of the journal French History published by Oxford University Press.

Select Publications
Books

• Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France: Revolution and Remembrance 1789-1799 (Cambridge University Press, 2007; 2nd edn, 2011).
• Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century: Making War, Mapping Europe, ed. with John Horne (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Journal (Special Issue)

• Religion and Violence in France: 1500 to the Present (ed.) French History special issue, vol. 33, no. ii (2019).

Articles and Essays

• ‘The Burning of Bédoin: Crime, Complicity and Civil War in Revolutionary France’, French Historical Studies (forthcoming, 2024)
• ‘”Why man not man be one day immortal?”’: Rethinking Death in the Age of Enlightenment, in Peter N. Stearns (ed.), The Routledge History of Death since 1800 (New York: Routledge, 2020), 177-93.
• ‘A “Theatre of Bloody Carnage”: The Revolt of Cairo and Revolutionary Violence’, in E. Charters, M. Houllemare and P. Wilson (eds), A Global History of Early Modern Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020)., 219-34.  
• ‘Religion and Violence in France: 1500 to the Present’, French History, vol. 33, no. ii (2019), 165-76.
• ‘“The Rage of the Fanatics”: Religious Fanaticism and the Making of Revolutionary Violence’, French History, vol. 33, no. ii (2019), 236-58. 
• ‘Peripheral Visions - Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century’, with J. Horne, in Clarke and Horne (eds), Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century – Making War, Mapping Europe (Palgrave McMillan, 2018), 1-21. 
• ‘Encountering the Sacred: British and French Soldiers in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Mediterranean’, in Clarke and Horne (eds), Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century – Making War, Mapping Europe (Palgrave McMillan, 2018), 45-69.  
• ‘Valour knows neither Age nor Sex’: The Recueil des Actions Héroïques et Civiques and the Representation of Courage in Revolutionary France', War in History, vol. 20 (2013), 50-75.
• ‘Death in the Year II: the dechristianisation of death in Revolutionary France’ in J. Kelly and M. Lyons (eds), Death and Dying in Ireland, Britain and Europe: Historical Perspectives (Dublin, 2013), 143-70.
• ‘The Napoleonic Wars in Caricature, 1799-1815', in W. Vaughan (ed.), The Old Library, Trinity College Dublin 1712-2012 (Dublin, 2012), 164-83.
• ‘The sacred names of the nation's dead: war and remembrance in revolutionary France’, in K. McLoughlin and A. Vincent (eds), Memory, Mourning and Landscape: Interdisciplinary essays (New York, 2010), 21-41.
• ‘Cenotaphs and cypress trees: commemorating the citizen-soldier in the Year II’, French History, vol. 22 (2008), 218-40.

Teaching and Supervision

I offer a range of modules on the political and cultural history of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Alongside undergraduate survey teaching on Europe in this period, I offer Special Subject Honors modules (levels 3 & 4) on the French Revolution (List 1), on Napoleon and on the religious history of France in the long eighteenth-century (List 2). At postgraduate level, I also teach modules on eighteenth-century cultural history and the enlightenment in France for the History Department’s M.Phil programme in Early Modern History. I am happy to supervise postgraduate research in any of these areas.

Dr. Clarke on the TCD Research Support System

Contact Details

Room 3153
Department of History
Trinity College
Dublin 2.

Telephone: +353 1 896 2378
Fax: +353 1 896 3995
Email: joseph.clarke@tcd.ie