Talk at Allegheny To Focus on Same-Sex Relations in 18th-century Paris

Jeffrey Merrick, emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, will give a talk titled “Same-Sex Relations in 18th-century Paris” at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 12 in the Tillotson Room of the Tippie Alumni Center at Allegheny College. The public is invited.

During the century preceding the French Revolution, defenders of tradition and advocates of Enlightenment engaged in abstract debates about human nature, destiny and sexuality. The police of Paris, meanwhile, subjected men involved in same-sex relations to surveillance, entrapment, arrest, interrogation and imprisonment. The hundreds of police reports in Parisian archives allow historians to reconstruct the geography and sociology of the sexual subculture and to analyze changes in patterns of repression over time.

A Meadville native, Merrick is the son of Sally Merrick and the late Wayne Merrick, who taught political science at Allegheny College for many years.

His presentation at Allegheny College is sponsored by the Department of History and the Women’s Studies Steering Committee.