Participant Info

First Name
Katherine
Last Name
McDonough
Affiliation
Stanford University
Website URL
https://history.stanford.edu/people/katie-mcdonough
Keywords
eighteenth-century France, infrastructure, spatial history, history of archives, digital history, Brittany, rural history, political culture, early modern technology
Additional Contact Information

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Katie is a historian of eighteenth-century France working at the intersection of political culture and the history of science and technology. She completed her PhD in History at Stanford in 2013. Before returning to Stanford in 2018 as a digital history specialist, she taught at Bates College and was a postdoctoral researcher in digital humanities at Western Sydney University (Australia). Her first book manuscript, Public Works Laboratory: Building a Province in Eighteenth-Century France is a spatial history of the corvée, the forced labor regime used from the 1730s until the Revolution on highway construction sites.

Her archival research is complemented by new methods from the fields of Natural Language Processing and Geographic Information Science.

Recent Publications

“Putting the Eighteenth Century on the Map: A Proposal for Early Modern French Geospatial Data Development,” in Digitizing Enlightenment, ed. by Glenn Roe and Simon Burrows (Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment, 2019).

“A Provincial Domain? The Breton Estates, the Royal Domain, and Highway Construction in the Eighteenth Century,” in Le financement des infrastructures de transport, ed. by Anne Conchon, David Plouviez, and Eric Szulman (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 2018).

With Matje van de Camp, “Mapping the Encyclopédie: Geographic Text Analysis for the French Enlightenment,” ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, 7 November 2017.

“La corvée en Haute et Basse Bretagne: les pratiques et les plaintes des paroisses sur les grands chemins en 1769,” Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne, vol. XC (2012), 329-349.

“Road Construction Sites in 18th-century France: Labor and Administration in Action,” with Anne Conchon, Nuts and Bolts of Construction History: Culture, Technology, and Society, R.Carvais, A. Guillerme, V. Nègre, and J. Sakarovitch eds. (Paris: Picard, 2012) vol. 2, 165-172.

Media Coverage
Country Focus
France
Expertise by Geography
France, Western Europe
Expertise by Chronology
18th century, Early Modern
Expertise by Topic
Computational, Environment, Libraries & Archives, Politics, Rural & Agrarian History, Technology