Gregory Brown, Professor
Department of History
(702) 895-4181
FAX: (702) 895-1782
Gregory S. Brown received his Ph.D. in European History from Columbia University in 1997, with a specialization in French Cultural and Intellectual History. He has taught at Columbia, Hunter College, and George Mason University, and he is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he has taught courses in western civilization, French history, European cultural history and history and new media. Currently, he is also the Vice Provost of Faculty, Policy and Research at UNLV.
His research studies strategies of “self-fashioning” in Enlightenment-era France, particularly the representations deployed by writers for the royal theater, the Comédie Française, in their efforts to attain the status of “homme de lettres.” His work also addresses such related issues as peformance and printing; the rhetoric and practice of patronage; literary property; and censorship. He has published articles and delivered papers on these topics as well as on Beaumarchais and the Société des auteurs dramatiques, on utopian discourse in the French Enlightenment, and on theater criticism in the eighteenth-century French periodical press.
He has published articles from this research in such journals as the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, French Historical Studies, French History, Eighteenth-Century Studies and Historical Reflections, and in the Journal of Modern History (which was awarded the Clifford Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies).
He has also published two books on this topic: the first, A Field of Honor: The Identities of Writers, Court Culture and Public Theater in the French Intellectual Field from Racine to the Revolution, has been awarded an American Historical Association “Gutenberg-e” prize and has been published by the Electronic Publishing Initiative of Columbia University Press. The second, Literary Sociability and Literary Property in France, 1774 – 1793: Beaumarchais, the Comédie Française and the Société des auteurs dramatiques, has been published in Ashgate Press’s “Studies on European Culture in Transition” series.
Among his other projects, he is author of Cultures in Conflict: The French Revolution (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003) and Associate Editor, with Jeff Horn of Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution (Penn State University Press, 2001), a multi-media, interactive cd-rom, website produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in conjunction with the American Social History Project of the City University of New York.
He currently lives in the historic Southridge neighborhood of Las Vegas with Jessica, Aaron, Sophia, and Clyde. (Old: Aaron, Sophia)
