Index # 08775
Will Count Towards History MAJOR
Will Count Towards History MINOR
How we dress and design our homes is deeply revealing of cultural norms and social aspirations. This is true today and it was true in the past. Fashion and design are also deeply embedded in the technology and economic practices of every culture. Studying clothing fashions and home design provides a distinctive perspective on the connections between social and gender relations, domestic and global systems, tradition and novelty, and between politics and culture.
This course will focus on a series of "moments" in European history when aesthetic style became a flashpoint for cultural change. In order to understand the values that were at stake in the aesthetic choices European men and women made in different eras, students in this class will focus on the tensions between older styles and the adoption of newer styles. Case studies will focus on fashion and design in Italy, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria, England, and Scandinavia.
About Professor Jones
Jennifer Jones began teaching at Rutgers in 1991 after studying at Grinnell College as an undergraduate and pursuing her Ph.D. in European history at Princeton. She regularly teaches Development of Europe I and II, which over the course of a year permits her to travel from the Parthenon of Athens in the 5th century BCE to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. She specializes in 18th-century France and women’s history and teaches courses on both topics. She teaches seminars on the history of fashion, the history of girls, and the history of the French Revolution, among other topics. Her first book is Sexing la Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France. She is currently writing a book on Thérèse Levasseur, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s mistress, and is researching children’s experience during the French Revolution. Future plans include a foray into Irish history with a study of Archibald Hamilton Rowan (1751-1834), a late eighteenth-century Irish revolutionary and founding member of the Society of United Irishmen.