Michael Wintroub

This project investigates the Atlantic world and how it shaped the contours and texture of French politics and culture in the early modern period. It is both a micro history about particular groups and networks of actors, and a global history about fundamental transformations in the ways western societies have come to adjudicate questions of power, knowledge and authority. By examining the intricate network of human, material and ideational associations among Jesuits in Normandy and New France, the Companies of Sénégal and the Saint-Sacrement, Parisian salon, the Académie Française and the Académie des Sciences, this study maps out and explore the "trading zones"--the liminal and agonistic spaces betwixt and between cultures, classes and competencies--where knowledge, identity and power were made.