Tabetha Ewing

Associate Professor of History

Primary Academic Program: Historical Studies

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Africana Studies, Experimental Humanities, French Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights, Middle Eastern Studies

Biography: B.A., Bard College; M.A., Ph.D., history, Princeton University. Tabetha Ewing, associate professor of history, chair of the Social Studies Division, and former dean of studies at Bard High School Early College (2009–14), is the author of Rumor, Diplomacy and War in Enlightenment Paris (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014). She serves as cochair of the Columbia University Seminar “Beyond France.” She is also a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities. Her teaching and research interests are in the sociocultural and sociopolitical history of 18th-century France, early-modern media, early-modern city, early-modern women and gender, old-regime borders, old-regime police, francophone black diasporic thought, and négritude. Her current work-in-progress, provisionally titled “Rights Over Persons: France and Extradition in the Age of Kings,” is on runaway wives, clandestine marrieds, fugitive slaves, dissident writers, counterfeiters, identity thieves, and spies. It explores the confluence of emergent state and individual sovereignty and international policing before the era of modern extradition treaties and national borders. Using diplomatic correspondence and the supplication letters of the detainees, this book will show political subjectivity unfolding, not only in the world of ideas or revolutionary events, or among a special class of subject, but also in the confrontation of states around often marginal subjects who transgress and, in doing so, invent political boundaries. She has been at Bard since 1998.
Phone: 212-995-8479
Location: Fairbairn
Office: 205