Office: 468 Humanities

Ph.D., Northwestern University

Dr. Erin-Marie Legacey specializes in the history of early modern and modern France.  Her book, Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780-1830 unearths the unexpectedly lively burial culture that developed in the wake of the French Revolution as Parisians debated, planned, and used new spaces for the dead, including Père Lachaise Cemetery, the Paris Catacombs, and the Museum of French Monuments. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Newberry Library, where she was a 2015-2016 long-term fellow.  Although she is sad to leave the dead behind, Dr. Legacey is beginning a new research project that pulls her up out of the Catacombs and into the stratosphere, as she investigates spectacles of daredevilry in the first half of the nineteenth century, when things like hot air ballooning and parachuting flourished as entertainment in France. 

Dr. Legacey teaches courses in French and European history.  She has supervised master's theses on a range of topics, including eighteenth-century erotic fiction, subversive women in belle époque Paris, and the AIDS crisis in contemporary France.


Courses

HIST 1301        Western Civilization II
HIST 3353        History of Modern France
HIST 3355        Europe in Transformation, 1814-1914
HIST 4353        The French Revolution and Napoleon
HIST 4354        From Vampires to Death Tourism: The Dead in Europe

HIST 5360        Studies in French History
HIST 6301        Research Methods Seminar