Dr Alex Fairfax-Cholmeley

Office: Laver 301 (up main stairs in Laver to first floor, turn right and through double doors into Archaeology, my office is the first on the right)

Office hours Spring 2024 (15 January - 29 March)

Mondays: 16.30-17.30 (online only)

Wednesdays 9.00-10.00 (in person or online)

I joined the University of Exeter as Lecturer in European History in September 2014. My research centres on the lived experience of revolution in the Francophone world. In the European sphere, my focus has been on the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the mechanics and impact of ‘revolutionary justice’ and the Terror during that decade. I am currently researching the French Atlantic via study of the print culture surrounding the slave-led revolution that turned France's prized colony of Saint-Domingue into the nation state of Haiti.

I am also interested in harnessing the field of digital humanities to improve historical research and the student experience. I am the editor of a new online resource, ‘Revolutionary Duchess: The Elbeuf Letters, 1788-94’. This provides free public access to a digital edition of the writings of the duchess of the Elbeuf, a wealthy noblewoman with strident Counter-Revolutionary views whose work has never previously been available in English translation. It has been developed in collaboration with the University of Exeter’s Digital Humanities Lab, and there will be a series of events in the twelve months from September 2021 to introduce this new resource to A-level and undergraduate students and facilitate their engagement with it.

The Elbeuf Letters digital edition forms part of a larger 24 month AHRC-funded research project on which I am Co-Investigator, titled 'The Duchesse d'Elbeuf's Letters to a Friend, 1788-94'. As part of this, a scholarly edition of the complete Letters series (in the French original, and co-edited with Colin Jones and Simon Macdonald) will be published through Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment in early 2023.

Before arriving here at Exeter I had been researching and teaching at Queen Mary, University of London for seven years (including studying for my PhD from 2007-2011, under the supervision of Professor Colin Jones, FBA). I have also worked in the British Library, London as a Cataloguer of Early Printed Books (2012-13) and led a digitisation project of eighteenth and nineteenth-century French broadsides held at the John Rylands Research Institute, Manchester (2014). I received my BA in History (2004) and MA in Early Modern History (2006) from King’s College London.

My most recent publications are:

'Colonial Factions and Pamphlet Warfare: Writing Histories of Saint-Domingue and France during the Thermidorian Reaction, 1794-1795', French Historical Studies (forthcoming, January 2024).

Colin Jones, Simon Macdonald, Alex Fairfax-Cholmeley, The Letters of the duchesse d'Elbeuf: hostile witness to the French Revolution (2023).

'Reliving the Terror: Victims and Print Culture during the Thermidorian Reaction in France, 1794-1795.’ History, 104: 362 (2019): 606-629.

‘Creating and resisting the Terror: the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal, March-June 1793.’ French History 32: 2 (2018): 203-225.