Florida State’s Cathy McClive Earns Prestigious Fellowship From the French Institutes for Advanced Studies

Cathy McClive, the Ben Weider Professor in French Revolutionary Studies in the department of history at Florida State University, has been awarded a fellowship at the Collegium de Lyon in France by the French Institutes for Advanced Studies. Professor McClive will use her time in France to complete her third book, The Disappearance of Claudine Rouge: Rape, Murder, and Erasure in Eighteenth-Century France.

Claudine Rouge was a 17-year-old silk-worker’s daughter who disappeared June 25, 1767, from her parents’ home in Lyon. Rouge was raped and murdered before being found in a river five days after her disappearance. The “Claudine Rouge Affair” became the catalyst for a decades-long push for advancing forensic science in France.

“My in-progress book re-centers Claudine in the story of her own disappearance, the violence done to her, and the trauma her family and community suffered as an example of how we might restore humanity to subjects who are often objectified, victimized and silenced by the very archives that tell us of their existence,” Professor McClive said.

“Earning this fellowship is incredibly gratifying,” Dr. McClive added. “FIAS applications go through two rounds of rigorous international peer review, so the fellowship shows that top scholars in my field support my project.”

Before coming to Florida State University in 2017, Dr. McClive was an associate professor of early modern European history at Durham University in England. She is the author of Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France (Routledge, 2015) and co-author of The Art of Childbirth: A Seventeenth-Century Midwife’s Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant (Iter Press, 2023).

Professor McClive earned a doctorate in 2004 from the University of Warwick in England and conducted her postdoctoral studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, in Paris.