This lecture from Claire Goldstein (French and Italian, UC-Davis) is part of a spring 2016 lecture series, Versailles: Space, Power, Memory, organized by the Architectural Studies Program and the Department of French and Italian Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. The series is designed to investigate how the intensive study of the history and physical configuration of sites contributes to our understanding of what it means to be human.

Claire Goldstein's  first book, Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures and Accidents that Made Modern France, was published in 2007 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. She is currently at work on a book manuscript titled Comets in the Sun King’s Cosmos: Circulation and Epistemology in Early Modern France. This project examines how the last comets before Halley’s organize curiosity, scrutiny, resistance, and doubt regarding the epistemological status of observation, and crystalize alternative (nonofficial, sometimes contestatory) networks in which information and texts circulate. For more information on the lecture, contact Drew Armstrong at cda68@pitt.edu or click here.

This event is also sponsored by Artchitectural Studies Program, the Department of History of Art and Architecture, the Department of French and Italian, Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Department of History, the Department of Sociology, the Cultural Studies program, and the Humanities Center. For more information on the series, contact Drew Armstrong at cda68@pitt.edu or click here.