Barker Fellow - Easter 2027
Hilary Bernstein
Hilary J. Bernstein is a Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her first book, Between Crown and Community: Politics and Civic Culture in Sixteenth-Century Poitiers (Cornell, 2004), examines the development of political language, concepts of governance and participation, religious conflict, and relations with the French crown, while her second book, Historical Communities: Cities, Erudition, and National Identity in Early Modern France (Brill, 2021), extends the lens to address how local history writing in French cities constituted an engaged practice, as urban elites collaborated to craft useful city histories.
Her current project, Genealogy, Family, and Memory in Early Modern France, focuses on the ways that French early modern families, interacting with erudite genealogical historians, engaged in the memorial practices of genealogical writing, as family stories and identities supported concerns for social ascension and service to the monarchy. Connected with these interests, Hilary has also co-edited a volume on Constructing European Historical Narratives in the Early Modern World (Brill, 2025).
At Durham, Hilary will particularly be working on a chapter focused on the ways that intense local conflict in Poitiers connected with the War of the Princes (1614-1616) was subsequently remembered and interpreted in family writings and memoirs.
