Dr. Cynthia Bouton

Biography

Cynthia Bouton focuses on early modern Revolutionary Europe and studies the ways inequities in access to basic subsistence needs—often linked to status/class, gender, race/ethnicity, and patronage/political relations—have influenced responses to suffering. Her research has analyzed responses to subsistence crises from 1775 in France and explored the history and politics of provisioning in France from the 17th to the 19th centuries. In her book, “Subsistence, Society, Culture in the Atlantic World: The Eighteenth Century and the Age of Revolution,” she examines staple food production, marketplace interactions, and the entangled Atlantic trade networks, along with metropolitan colonial government policies to understand adaptations to the “Atlanticization” of food regimes during the 18th-century revolutionary era. Currently, she is engaged in an international, collaborative Digital Humanities Project that integrates multiple datasets on food riots during the 17th century French Revolution, creating a global database of social conflict by collecting, aggregating, documenting, and comparing instances of this conflict.

Research Interests