Professor Harrison regularly teaches the survey of European history, women in modern Europe, and the Enlightenment. She teaches a graduate seminar on history and theory and another on women and gender. Her first book, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation, explored the formation of a male bourgeois elite in post revolutionary France.

Current Activities

I am presently working on a project about lay Catholics and their Church in nineteenth-century France. I’m interested in the reconstitution of the Church after the Revolution and in questioning the notion that religion, especially Catholicism, was somehow "feminized" in modern France. The research examines how women, men, and children practiced their faith, forming Catholic families that aspired to the regeneration of a Catholic France. I am also interested in the history of science and am engaged in research on French science in Australia. The revolutionary French state launched major scientific expeditions to Australia, and the specimens they returned with were crucial to the development of French evolutionary thought. In collaboration with an Australian conservation biologist, I will be writing about the French encounter with Australian biodiversity.