Academic Profile

 
Professor Colin Jones is currently President of the Royal Historical Society. He has taught at the universities of Newcastle, Exeter, Warwick, Stanford, Paris, and Queen Mary's. He has held visiting fellowships at Princeton University, the Collège de France and the Columbia University Institute of Scholars, Reid Hall (Paris). From 2004 to 2008 he served on the History Panel of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, from 2006 to 2008 as Convenor. He has also served on the History of Medicine Panel (including as Vice-Chair) of the Wellcome Trust Academy.

 
Selected Publications

• Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpellier Region, 1740-1815 (Cambridge, 1982)
• Contre Retz: Sept pamphlets du temps de la Fronde (Exeter, 1982)
• The Longman Companion to the French Revolution (London, 1988)
• The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Regime and Revolutionary France (London, 1989)
• Medicine and Charity before the Welfare State (co-editor) (London, 1991)
• The Cambridge Illustrated History of France (Cambridge, 1994)
• Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body (co-editor) (London,1994)
• The Medical World of Early Modern France (co-author, with Laurence Brockliss) (Oxford, 1998)
• A Cultural Revolution: England and France, 1750-1820 (co-editor: Berkeley, California, 2002)
• The Great Nation: France, 1715-99 (London, 2002)
• Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress (London, 2002)
• Paris. Biography of a City (London, 2004)

 
Research

 
Professor Jones works on French history, particularly between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, and with special interests in the history of medicine. He has also written general histories of both France and Paris from earliest times to the present. Current research and writing projects include the history of physiognomy (the arts and sciences of the face), the history of the smile, Terror during the French Revolution, and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.