About the Author

Isabel DiVanna is a College Teaching Officer at Clare College, University of Cambridge. She was previously a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, where she researched the role of positivism as a moral and political philosophy in France and Latin America. She completed two doctorates, one at the University of Manchester, where she examined the medievalism of Gaston Paris, and one at the University of Cambridge, where she developed a study of the so-called “école méthodique.” She co-edited Historicising the French Revolution and is the author of Reconstructing the Middle Ages, both from Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Reviews

''The merit of DiVanna’s work is that she has analysed these seven mostly neglected historians in detail and convincingly argues that they do not deserve the bad reputation their successors gave them, but on the contrary played a crucial role in the development of French history writing.''Camille CreyghtonFrench History,27:1 (2013), 140-141.“Anyone interested in the intellectual history of the Third Republican France should read Isabel DiVanna on the period’s history and historians. She casts aside old ideas about their work as merely ‘methodical’ and overly determined by the tumultuous politics of the era and shows that they were more than mere handmaidens of Republican ideology. The result is a readable and learned account of their diversity and richness.”Ruth HarrisAuthor of Dreyfus and Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle“Isabel DiVanna’s book deepens our knowledge of French historical writing and thought at a time when historians were asserting their intellectual and professional independence. She explores the historiographical dimensions of Positivism, the characteristic philosophy of the early Third Republic. The authors she discusses wrote some of the most famous and influential works of French history. They had a formative influence on teaching in schools and universities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and consequently on the elaboration of national and republican identities.”Robert Tombs, Professor of French HistoryUniversity of Cambridge