Erika Vause

Dr. Vause is a specialist in the social and cultural history of law and economics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. At St. John’s University, she teaches undergraduate courses in early modern and modern European history including the Age of Revolution, Age of Absolutism, Crime and Punishment in Modern Europe, and the History of Modern France as well as graduate courses on topics relating to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and global history and the history of capitalism.

Although Dr. Vause’s original attachment to European history derived from a high school passion with the French Revolution (she still possesses a quarter-scale model guillotine in her office), her research has subsequently moved into the nineteenth century. Her first book, which examines the development of debt imprisonment and bankruptcy as a means of understanding the changing relationship between the economic and penal realms, is entitled In the Red and in the Black: Debt, Dishonor, and the Law in France Between Revolutions and is published with the University of Virginia Press.

Dr. Vause’s articles on debt and credit have appeared in leading journals including Law and History Review, French Historical Studies, Journal of Social History and Financial History Review as well as in several edited volumes. She has also co-edited a volume entitled The Cultural History of Money and Credit: A Global Perspective with Chia Yin Hsu and Thomas Luckett (Lexington Books 2015), which grew out of the biennial Richard Robinson Business History Workshop, a conference she co-organizes. Her current research project looks at future orientation and the culture of capitalism in France and the French Empire through an examination of the discourse of prévoyance (roughly translated as “foresight” or “planning”) a term that cuts across insurance, savings banks, retirement, public health and agricultural reform.