Rate My Professor Jan Goldstein

Jan Goldstein, Norman and Edna Freehling Professor Emerita of History, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College at the University of Chicago, specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of modern Europe, with a particular emphasis on France from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. She situates systems of thought within their social and political contexts, exploring how sociopolitical forces shape understandings of the self through the psychological sciences. Goldstein received her PhD from Columbia University in 1978. After teaching for one year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she joined the University of Chicago's Department of History in 1978, becoming one of the few women faculty members at the time. She co-founded the Workshop in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modern France and the Francophone World in 1991 and served as academic director of the University of Chicago Center in Paris from 2007 to 2008.

Her major publications include Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (1987, second edition 2001), which examines the professionalization of psychiatry and won the AHA's Herbert Baxter Adams Prize; The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850 (2005), analyzing competing psychological theories and their institutionalization, awarded the David Pinkney Prize; and Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux (2010), a microhistory probing text-context relations and Foucauldian-Freudian compatibilities. She edited Foucault and the Writing of History (1994) following a conference she organized. Since 1996, Goldstein has co-edited the Journal of Modern History. She supervised over 25 doctoral students, received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. In 2013, she was elected president of the American Historical Association for 2014, delivering her address on empirical history of moral thinking via racial theory in mid-nineteenth-century France.