Faculty Member, History
Northwestern University, History
College of William and Mary, Lyon G. Tyler Department of History
Assistant Professor
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Sarah Maza
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About
My project, presently titled "Living Proof: Intellectual Families and Knowledge-Making in Enlightenment France," examines the birth of a new intellectual ideal: the happily married male savant who collaborated fruitfully with his wife and children. It then considers how this domestic turn affected the practice, making, and representation of knowledge. The family could act as a workshop, with wives and children observing phenomena, calculating formula, providing illustrations, and promoting the finished product. At the same time, the family became an experimental space, a laboratory in which thinkers could apply their ideas about inoculation, education, and sentiment. Savants could then advertise these domestic experiences as evidence in favor of their theories and could thereby enhance their authority and trustworthiness.
