Rate My Professor Delphine Doucet

Dr Delphine Doucet serves as the Research and Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of Sunderland. She earned her PhD in History from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2008, with a thesis titled 'Jean Bodin’s Colloquium Heptaplomeres: Clandestine literature, heterodoxy and the possibility of toleration 1590-1750', supervised by Professor Justin Champion. In 2022, she graduated with distinction from an MA in Library and Information Services Management at the University of Sheffield, where her dissertation examined 'Authority and Knowledge creation: Wikipedia and higher education', exploring history lecturers' views on authority and Wikipedia's role in teaching. She began her studies with a Licence in History at Université François Rabelais in Tours, France, before transferring to Royal Holloway via the Erasmus programme. Doucet joined the University of Sunderland in 2010 as a lecturer in Early Modern History in the Department of Culture, delivering modules including HIS114 English Society and Culture 1500-1750, HIS219 History of Early Modern Political Thought, HIS393 Radicalism, Republicanism and Revolution 1400-1800, HIS392 Heresy, Intolerance and Beyond 1550-1765, and MA-level courses such as HISM62 Foundations of Liberty in Early Modern Thought: Resistance and Religious Toleration and HISM17 Blasphemy and Unbelief in Early Modern Europe. Previously, she taught at Royal Holloway, Birkbeck, and Goldsmiths colleges of the University of London starting in 2003.

Transitioning roles at Sunderland, Doucet became Academic Liaison Librarian for the School of Education, teaching information and media literacy to enhance students' research and critical thinking skills. In her current position, she assists researchers with their publication processes, open access compliance, research data management, and scholarly communications. Her academic interests encompass intellectual history of the early modern period, focusing on religious toleration after the Reformation, church-state dynamics, theories of resistance and republicanism in France and England, and the spread of heterodox ideas from pre-Enlightenment to Enlightenment eras. Contemporary pursuits include digital literacy, combating misinformation, authority in public discourse, information literacy in higher education, and open access's impact on academic publishing. Notable publications feature 'Questioning Authorities: Scepticism and Anti-Christian Arguments in the Colloquium Heptaplomeres' (History of European Ideas, 2013), 'Religion at the Dinner Table, a Sixteenth-Century Dialogue' (2018), and 'Authority of Knowledge: Historians on Wikipedia in Higher Education' (2023). She welcomes supervision of topics in Early Modern British and European intellectual history, particularly 17th- and 18th-century themes of government legitimacy, resistance, toleration, and religious diversity.