Jennifer J. Davis is L.R. Brammer, Jr. Presidential Professor of early modern European history and an affiliate member of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Since 2020, she has served as Editor of the Journal of Women’s History. Prof. Davis worked as a consultant on the TLC program “Who Do You Think You Are?” introducing American rock star Melissa Etheridge to her French-Canadian roots. Awarded the Regents’ Award for Superior Teaching, Prof. Davis is a dedicated and innovative classroom instructor. She regularly teaches courses on early modern and modern European history, including France and Haiti in Revolution, Marie Antoinette, European women’s and gender history, and the European Enlightenments. Prof. Davis’s publications have addressed issues of work, food and cuisine, religious identity, gender, sexuality and the law in eighteenth-century France and the Atlantic world.
Prof. Davis’s research has earned financial support from the University of Oklahoma, the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Council for European Studies at Columbia University, the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.
In 2023, Prof. Davis published Bad Subjects: Libertine Lives in the French Atlantic, 1619-1814. The book consides what it meant to be called a libertine in early modern France and its colonies. Davis unites analysis of law codes, police reports, and literature to trace how this category signifying religious deviance in the seventeenth century came to connote sexual deviance and racial transgression by the end of the eighteenth century.
In 2013, Prof. Davis published Defining Culinary Authority: The Transformation of Cooking in France, 1650-1830. This book examines police records, merchant accounts, cookbooks, and scientific treatises to explore the economic and social forces that shaped culinary labor in a period of rapid economic and political change.
Prof. Davis is currently researching eighteenth-century debates on polygamy, the history of sexuality in Enlightenment-era Europe, and republican theater in revolutionary New Orleans, Haiti and Cuba, 1783-1820. She directs student research on a wide range of topics in early modern and modern European and Atlantic history.
