Professor Sarah Knott

Sarah Knott is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University. Her main research and teaching interests are in eighteenth-century North America and the Atlantic world. She was educated at Magdalen and St Hugh's Colleges (B.A., 1993, D.Phil., 1999) and the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., 1994). She has written Sensibility and the American Revolution (2009) and co-edited, with British historian Barbara Taylor, Women, Gender and Enlightenment (2005). Her articles have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly and the American Historical Review. Knott was the recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship to the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (2004-5), a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford (1999-2001), and a Thouron Foundation Fellowship to the University of Pennsylvania (1993-4). She has recently stepped down as Acting Editor of the American Historical Review.

During her year at Exeter, Knott is at work on a book provisionally titled Witnessing an Age of Revolution. The research is prompted by the observation that - unlike with earlier important political events - dozens of foreign witnesses were moved to write first-hand accounts of the eighteenth-century American, French and Haitian Revolutions. What explains this sudden outpouring of personal commentary, and what were the cultural consequences of the fact that, for contemporaries across the revolutionary orbit, these intimate accounts became a key means of comprehending the significance of Revolution? Tracking this story is a means of exploring the history of subjectivity and revolution, as well as an opportunity to tell the history of three revolutions more typically told apart.