Katharine Hamerton
312-344-7954
Katharine Hamerton is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia College Chicago. She received her B.A. (Hons.) degree in History and English literature from the University of Manitoba , and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in History from The University of Chicago. Formerly Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri, she joined the Liberal Education Department in August 2005, where her teaching includes the French Revolution, Medieval Europe, and a new class, a Level 3 History and Cultural Studies seminar, “Taste, Class and Gender in Modern France,” starting in Fall 2008.
Dr. Hamerton’s areas of interest lie in eighteenth-century French intellectual, gender and cultural history, specifically the history of changing ideas about women’s leadership in and influence on taste in France during the Enlightenment. Her article, “Malebranche, Taste and Sensibility: The Origins of Sensitive Taste and a Reconsideration of Cartesianism’s Feminist Potential,” is forthcoming in The Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 4 (October 2008), and she is completing another, “ An Honnête Feminist of the Early Enlightenment: Madame de Lambert’s Thought on Taste and the Female Mind.” Dr. Hamerton is preparing an annotated translation of a selection of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century salonnière madame de Lambert’s writings as part of “ The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” series. She is also planning a monograph revision of her doctoral dissertation on taste and gender in Old Regime region France.