Historian of Modern France

I am the David E. Underdown Professor of Modern European History at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Specializing in French cultural and gender history, my research interests range from the history of marriage, reproduction, war, and consumerism in postrevolutionary France to gendered codes of honor and citizenship during the Third Republic.

You can reach me at amansker@sewanee.edu 

My new book, Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell University Press, 2024), is a prehistory of online dating that follows the struggles and triumphs of two larger-than-life marriage brokers who took advantage of print advertising, sociopolitical flux and a shifting urban terrain to establish the consumer craze of commercial matchmaking in

Paris and in the virtual medium of the classifieds. By linking marital choice to consumer capitalism, brokers transformed courtship and marriage into forms of commercial exchange associated with the new urban values of abundance, pleasure, and social mobility.

My previous book, Sex, Honor and Citizenship in Early Third Republic France (Palgrave, 2011), examines French women’s renegotiation of citizenship through the unlikely lens of the masculine honor system. It argues that women appropriated the public honor culture that celebrated male dueling and dictated the proper social and sexual forms of men’s comportment to enact new models of female civic participation.