Awards and Service
- President, Western Society for French History,
2010-2011.
- Rotunda Teaching Award and HOPE Award, 2003>
- Godbey Lecture
Series Authors’ Award, 2003.
- Public Scholar, Cary Maguire
Center for Ethics, 2002.
- President’s Associates Outstanding
Faculty Award, 2001-02.
-
Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, University of Oklahoma, History of
Science Department, 1998-99.
- National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for College Teachers, 1996-97.
- NEH Summer Institute, “Science, Religion, and Society in Early Modern Europe," University of Florida, 1990.
- NEH Seminar, "Descartes and his Contemporaries," Cornell, 1986.
Books and Essays
-
Queens and Mistresses of
Renaissance France, Yale
University Press, 2013.
-
The Enlightenment, ed. with Dena Goodman, Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
- Making Science Social: The Conferences of Théophraste Renaudot, 1633-1642,
Series in History and Culture, University of Oklahoma Press, 2003.
- La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment , Duke University Press, 1992.
- “Physiology and Sexual Morality in the French Enlightenment ,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2002>
- “Talismans, Incubi, Divination and the
Book of M.: The Bureau d'adresse confronts the Occult,”Sixteenth-century Studies, 1999.
Professor Kathleen Wellman’s work focuses on the connections between science and culture in early modern France. Her career reflects the evolution of both the history of science and of intellectual
history, disciplines which have become more sensitive to the broad cultural contexts that shape
scientific careers and the production of knowledge in which intellectuals flourish.
In Making Science Social, Wellman provokes a reevaluation of conventional accounts of the scientific revolution and challenges common assumptions about the character of early seventeenth-century French culture through her study of the published proceedings of a series of conferences held in Paris every Monday afternoon from 1633 - 42. Théophraste Renaudot, a cultural and scientific impresario, was the guiding force behind them and their publisher.
Intended to present an encyclopedic array of seventeenth-century fare—more than 400 topics cover almost every imaginable (and some unimaginable) social, cultural, and scientific concerns—the conferences, in Wellman’s analysis, are revealed as important sources for the early development of the social sciences.
In La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment, Wellman explores the ways in which philosophe and physician, Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s medical concerns shaped his views on philosophy, morals, and social reform, and, conversely, how the emerging thought of the Enlightenment was reflected in his medical writings. La Mettrie emerges as a central figure in connecting medicine to the Enlightenment and in elucidating the medical view of nature, human beings, and society that the Enlightenment bequeathed to the modern world.
Wellman continues to explore a fundamental revolution in the eighteenth century, the admission of physiological thinking as central to the understanding of human beings and, equally important, a willingness to apply physiology to understanding human beings in society, providing a forum and a context in which radical philosophical ideas could be generated and openly discussed.
Inspired by the interest of her students in the SMU-in-Paris program, Wellman considers how queens and mistresses of Renaissance France transformed the court into a center of culture and the feudal knight into a courtier. Royal women, from Agnès Sorel, designated as the first official royal favorite of the French king Charles VII in 1444, to Gabrielle d’Estrée the mistress Henry IV promised to marry just before her death in 1599, exercised political power and cultural influence. They were the subjects and patrons of artists and writers who left a legacy in the paintings, histories, memoirs, legends, and myths generated across the centuries.
Last
updated 10/11. |
